Peter Keen - Director of Performance, UK Sport HARDtalk

It is time for HARDtalk. -- behead. The official Olympic creed says it

is not the winning that counts but the taking part. Try telling that

to the elite professional athletes and coaches who have dedicated

their lives to the quest for gold medals. With the London Games less

than 100 days away, my guest is Peter Keen - performance director

for UK Sport. In Beijing he helped deliver a record medal haul for

Team GB. In London, the aim is to do even better. But has the cult of

Peter Keen, welcome to HARDtalk. Maybe it is time to turn the old

Olympic mantra around. Maybe it is not the taking part that matters,

it is the winning. Is that true? Fascinating question. I think the

truth behind both of these perspectives is that it is actually

the journey. The greatest appeal and reward of sporting endeavour is

the journey you went on to be that person. What the Olympic movement

is about is striving to be the best you can be and the best in that

context is the champion. Not everyone makes it. When that

journey is the right one, it is taken on in the right way. Whenever

someone reaches their limits, that is often an extremely positive

experience for that individual. It is never all about the gold. But

the notion of taking part without the aspiration to be the best is

not being truly honest to the spirit of sport. When you talk

about the spirit of sport, I get the sense that you feel it is no

longer adequate to have the old Corinthian approach and simply say,

I will heroically try against all odds to do something, even if I do

not see it as a life and death matter. That might have been the

attitude of many British athletes 20 years ago. Is that not good

enough? It is a sort of technical knockout. It is a choice that has

been taken away by the movement itself. To be at the Olympics for

any sport requires a qualification process which absolutely tests

athletes to the limit. In effect, those who get the opportunity to

get there are already world-class. The idea that nations can nominate

somebody they like is not an option. The nature of the competition is

established before the Games start. In many disciplines, the numbers of

competitors are fewer than the numbers mentioned. -- numbers of

nations. That sets the tone we're talking about. When I look at the

way you have talked and written about what you do with the elite

athletes, it strikes me that you use the language of business as

much as sport. You talk about systems, analysis of data, you use

the phrase "performance pathways". It seems as if you are more Harvard

business school then the training ground. Part of it is a business.

The language you're picking up on and the citations you are making

are part of the story, but not the whole. The business side of it is a

reflection of the fact that in Olympic sport, the reality of the

modern Games is that success is dependent not just on the

individual but the support of their nation in terms of investing in

training, preparation, facilities. There are many requirements that

somebody has to resource. Inevitably, governments and public

agencies fund the programmes. talking huge sums of money. People

might be amazed to know that in the UK, since we're the host nation,

�500 million has been spent on elite sport. It is a very

significant sum of money. It is probably best thought of as going

towards the individual cost. For an elite athlete to eat, sleep and

breathe their sport, travel the world, access the equipment they

need. When you add up the costs, they come to around �60,000 per

year for each athlete. A lot of this money comes straight from the

taxpayer. Can that be justified? This Olympics has coincided with an

era of austerity in the industrialised world. Can this be

justified? Let's put it into perspective. The majority of the

budget was funded by the National Lottery. It is not technically

Exchequer funding from the Government. But it is not all

lottery funding. Since London got the Games, it has been enhanced by

Exchequer funding from the Government. It is a relatively

small sum in the scheme of things in terms of total GDP. But let's go

back to the notion of the business of sport. If, as a nation, we want

to see our best sportspeople have the best chance of winning, there

is a cost to doing that. The bigger cost is for the individual in their

life. The business side is in a sense non-negotiable. You need a

pool if you are a swimmer. You need to travel to meets around the world.

Somebody has to pay for that. We need the right resources for the

right individual. It is a brutal and bloody business. In essence,

you are saying to some sportspeople, "You're just not world class and we

can't put money into you." You must ruthlessly back winners. Table

tennis for example, you were not happy that the players would ever

be at the very top so you withdrew 15% of their funding. -- 50%. The

coach left, saying his players were demoralised. To be precise, all the

sports preparing for London received what we felt was the

optimal funding to move from the level of performance they were at

to the level they could be in London. There are differences. The

reality of the scenario you have described is that the deal with our

Government was not one they could see through in terms of the

changing income. We were very clear before we set out on this journey

that if the resources did not materialise down the line, we would

cut from the bottom up in terms of priority and the opportunity to win.

Every sport knew that before we started. Hard though it is, it is a

very strong meritocracy. You might perceive this as ruthless but it is

honest to the business of high- performance sport. We are aspiring

to win. It seems that it is not just about isolating particular

sports. You are clearly excited with your cycling background about

the potential of British cycling and British swimming. But it is not

just about isolating the sport where things are coming together,

but the individuals. Have you thought through the messages you

are giving to these elite sports people? It seems as though you and

other top administrators looking to burnish our Olympic record treat

the athletes as automatons. I would argue that what motivates me in my

role are the experiences of coaching individuals for over a

decade. This is in cycling? cycling. Working on a daily basis

with people in an area where there was no public funding, through to

the National Lottery revolution in the 90s, to where we are today. I

hope I have never lost sight of the reality of someone pursuing that

dream. Some attain success but some do not get to where they want to be.

I'm leading up to this, an honest dialogue has always been necessary

about where somebody is at and where they are going. This is the

approach we have to take. If we're not looking at the realities of

each individual athlete, we're not being honest. It's like a football

team. Somebody has to make the decision of who is on the bench and

who is on the field. If you're doing that right, you're picking

people on merit. What did you make of the words that came from the

diving performance director who was talking about Tom Daley he said, he

seemed distracted. He was too much in front of the media, not working

hard enough in the pool. And he said the Chinese work much harder.

They restrict their athletes much more and he said he supported that

approach. He is speaking to a fairly obvious cultural difference

between nations. Should we be more like them? You have talked a lot

about medal targets. You want to beat the 47 medals Britain won in

Beijing and you think we can better it. You want to get closer to where

the Chinese are. Should we adopt their methods? Absolutely not. Not

because I have a negative view of them but because I believe

profoundly in winning on our terms, in something that feels culturally

right for the UK. The sense of individual choice and opportunity

on merit is very important in our approach. A degree of

professionalism we are seeking is in many ways motivated by what I

see in other fields of endeavour, particularly the performance arts.

If we look at the pathway to The Royal Ballet or a leading school of

music, these have systems. They are well funded and they are developed

on merit. There is an expectation that at the end, you will be world

class. If you make it as an elite sports person and win a gold medal,

as a former top UK decathlon said, any who wins cold this summer will

be, made for life. Isn't it harder in that context to deliver the

discipline, the total rigour that you might need? I think we have to

challenge some of the mythology there. The reality for many

Olympians is not that it makes you for life at all in financial terms.

I would hope the experience they went on and the experience they had

changes them for life. But the reality I can talk of is that often

the two years after the win in the majority of sports is a difficult

time. It is not a pot of gold in that sense. To get the endorsements,

the sponsorship, that might lead to significant wealth is very hard

work. It is also distracting. It asks you to do things you don't

like doing, or compromise your training. It is often difficult and

are rarely does it led to the source of wealth being implied by

Many top athletes are getting distracted, is that the case?

is a risk. One of the many benefits of the system that we have been

talking about today that has resulted from the scale of

investment that you have raised is that there is a level of

professionalism, and I don't just mean the quality of the individuals,

that actually manages these things effectively. The headlines are

compelling but the reality of the daily life of most of our athletes

is that it is pretty monastic, pretty thorough. Those risks are

known. There is a lot of risk and there is work going on to mitigate

that. We want to optimise Britain's success. Do you want every top

athlete to be available? I am thinking about the small handful of

athletes who have been convicted of drugs offences in the past. People

who have served their time. People who have served their bans under

international sporting law. The British Olympic Association says

they will not have drug cheats in the team. Do you want those

individuals to be in the team? personal perspective on this is

what I want above all is clarity and consistency of rules in sport.

There must be rules that are clear and the belief that when people

play by then the outcome is fair. But they have played by the rules

because the outcome is fair. I am talking about David Millar. He has

become a serious campaigner against doping in sport. Should he be part

of the cycling team? At the individual level, it is very

difficult to have a view that is balanced in the sense of... Can I

come back to winning? You want to win. Presumably that means you want

David Millar to be part of the cycling squad. Not as much as I

want the rules to be clear. I think sport needs clarity of rules

whenever it is possible. If you have the world anti-doping code

clearly signed by the Olympic movement and all governing bodies,

if that says that these are the penalties for doping offences and

these are the consequences of them, those are the rules we should be

playing by. Whatever the motivations are of different

organisations, the danger is moving away from the bigger picture of

what sport needs. I think what you are saying is you think the British

Olympic Association is stretched too far in trying to make this a

lifetime ban from the Olympics for British athletes. That is the legal

opinion. Is it your opinion? It is certainly my view that the bigger

picture here is to have consistency. If that means a lifetime ban across

all sports, there is a process to establish that. If the current

rules as they apply across the world of sport are clear, I think

that is where we need to be. Clarity and consistency. Another

big controversy right now when it comes to the British Olympic team

and the team ethic is that there are a very large number of athletes

in the British team who were not born in the United Kingdom, in some

cases have very little long-term links to the United Kingdom and

have been dubbed in some national newspapers as plastic Brits. I find

this a little disturbing, if I am honest. It is a very dangerous line

of reasoning, to speculate about individuals' motivations for coming

to the UK. This will be an easy one to get a handle on. Tiffany Porter

is a great athlete in the 100 metre hurdles. She wanted to compete for

the United States. She is born in Michigan, raised in the United

States. She has British and Nigerian parents. She tried to get

into the US Olympic team in 2008 and failed. By 2010, she decided

she wanted to run for Britain. She is entitled to because of her

parents. Does it makes sense for her to be the team captain of the

GB athletics team? We have to look at her eligibility and what

determines it. Again, an argument about clarity of rules.

technical as that. Not about emotion for you. The rules and

whether you qualify. There are rules. If you had issues with the

timing in which someone can change nationality, you should look at the

rules. The second point is about the wisdom of her captaining the

team. For me, that comes into the team in terms of the management of

that and the views of the athletes. Was it wise? I was not there.

know the athletes and it is part of your job to ensure they are happy.

Do you think it was wise to appoint this particular woman to be team

captain? If the dynamics that arose in that team, the beliefs they had,

her leadership, if that enhances the team, it was the right call. If

it is divisive and negative, regardless where it came from, then

it is the wrong call. For me, if you are eligible, you are eligible.

If it is the right call, it is the right call. It is more complicated

than that because of the long-term implications. That brings us to the

legacy of the game. Wrestling, four of the British squad are from the

Ukraine. One is from Bulgaria. Here are the words of one British

wrestler who is deeply unhappy about this, Mark Cocker, he says

"UK Sport funding by bringing these people to this country and making

them part of the team is having the opposite effect of a positive

legacy in our sport of wrestling. I had been in the sport for 17 years

and it was much healthier before UK Sport came into it." It is a

fascinating example. You're talking about consequence. There clearly is

a point. The scenario where the individuals you describe were

invited to the UK to come as training partners. It was about

trying to raise the expectations and the standard of British

wrestling. That is a risk. It is an opportunity to establish a level of

expertise relevant to Olympic performance. We would not have had

wrestlers qualifying by right to be at the Games if we had not done

something to raise the standards. The training partners have chosen

to stay here. A few succeed. If we do as well as you hope in the

medals table, team GB in 2012, but the participation level continues

to fall, will that be a success? Would it be a good legacy or a

failed legacy for London 2012? think the connect between success

in sport and the desire for people to do it is one in sport we

fundamentally believe in. You think winning medals has a major impact

on the wider sporting world? think it makes sport more visible

to people than any other intervention that I can think of.

The vast majority of Olympians that I have known will cite the vision

of another person in the generation before them winning as the

motivation for them to take up the sport. On an anecdotal level, it

generates champions. The extent to which it drives people to take up