No 6: What's wrong with throwing in the UK?

Problems and solutions

Welcome back to post No 6!

Today was my monthly trip to Cardiff to train with Paul, Neil and Jake K at NIAC. As usual after throwing heavy things around for an hour or two, we sat down with coffee and biscuits to put the world to right. Being throwers, of course there was biscuits!

Today’s conversation was pretty far ranging but the main topic was this: “is athletics/throwing dying a slow death in the UK? And if so, why? And what could re-invigorate it?” 

This is a meaty subject and we barely scratched the surface in an hour’s chat but I thought it might be helpful to list a summary of the issues and some solutions. Then hopefully, this might spark some debate within the wider throwing and athletics community. It’s also something I will end up coming back to in future posts. 

No 5 – World Records and the Ultimate Throws

I am still waiting for someone to produce the definitive mathematical answer for how far its humanly possible to throw any of the events. Surely, the maths cant be that challenging. And, so many of these other previous questions haven’t been fully answered either:

No 3 - How to be a better thrower? Lots of questions without answers!

Is throwing, and athletics more broadly, dying as a sport?

The answer to this probably depends who you ask.

World records are still being broken. The Olympics and World Championships still get plenty of views on TV. Elite athletes post their clips on Youtube and Instagram and have quite a few followers. There are still plenty of clubs in the UK.

However…

In the UK specifically, participation rates seem to be dropping. Fewer kids are doing athletics in schools or are joining clubs.

Coaches are aging and there are not enough of them.

Officials are aging and there are not enough of them.

School, county and regional records are still standing from the 1960’s suggesting that as a whole, the sport has not progressed much in the last 60 years.

So, if the sport is not actually dying, it is not growing either.

What are some of the issues holding throwing/athletics back?

1. Fewer people of all ages are training or competing in athletics across the UK. 

2. If you have fewer people entering the sport, then you are unlikely to develop as many elite athletes. And without elite athletes acting as role models the sport is likely to shrink further.

3. Athletics is hard, it requires a lot of training, years of commitment, support from coaches, the right facilities and even then, you might not reach the top. This is a tough sport for anyone to get into and continue.

4. There are lots of tracks and clubs, but facilities are only open for training for about 6 hours a week (3x 2h). Mostly because these are council run, or owned by football clubs who want to use the facilities the rest of the time.  

5. Not every club has a coach for all events.

6. There are not that many technically event coaches (jumps, pole vault, throws, hurdles, multi-events) across the UK. 

7. There is not an effective outreach programme screening kids and recruiting them into athletics. 

8. There is very little money spent on athletics.

9. Athletes do not earn a good salary and there is not much money to be won in competitions or from sponsorship. And so, pride is the only incentive to become a good athlete.

10. Others sports are attracting talented athletes because there is a better lifestyle to be earned and more money to be won. 

11. Sports like CrossFit, strongman, hyrox, tough mudder, ultra running, all seem to be growing in numbers and funding and taking athletes away from athletics. 

12. Lack of TV coverage 

13. Lack of team ethos 

14. To be a coach in the UK requires too much online mandatory training, too much time and not enough in return. 

15. The sports governing body has no democratic feedback mechanism. Surely, all members in the UK should be able to vote for some sort of council that has over site of the sport? 

I may have missed quite a few things off this list, please let me know what I have missed. Many of the above you may agree or disagree with. Why not let me know what you think in the comments?

What can we do the adapt and grow the sport?

The simple answer to this is that we need more people, with bigger incentives, more coaches and better facilities.

I will break this wish list down a bit further below.

Firstly, we need better incentives for people to become athletes and coaches:

1. We need to recruit money people into the sport. Especially at a younger age. 

2. We need to encourage sponsorship of the sport.

3. Athletes should be offered better university scholarships, like in America.

4. Athletes should be allowed to develop their own sponsorship deals, and be able to compete in kit that has sponsorship logos on. The era of amateurism is a charade and is holding back the sport. Only wealthy athletes or those with national funding are currently able to train hard enough to be able to win events. Allowing sponsorship will allow more athletes more time to train.

5. Allowing sponsorship will also encourage advertising of events and this could be used to put prize money into competitions.

6. Breaking records and winning events with prizes would be a small incentive to improve performance and may help athletes to stay in the sport.

7. Athletes, clubs, associations and competition organisors should develop better Instagram and youtube videos of events. If more people can see impressive performances online then this can drive social media recruitment and money raised from Youtube advertising could go back into developing events and paying officials.

8. Coaches should be encouraged to charge for their training. Relying on volunteers is not a sustainable model. Coaches who developing good online programmes involve S+C plus technical analysis could become self sustaining small businesses allowing them to have more time to devote to the sport, rather than the current situation that relies on a coach being available for 2h a week.

9. Paying to enter events and developing event and athlete sponsorship could also go towards paying officials for their time more competitively. £75/day is not enough money to pay officials for a full day. If people could be paid more like £200/day then we would be able to recruit more officials to the sport.

10. It may help the sport to grow if more things were paid for and there was less of an amateur/volunteer aspect. For example, people pay for fitness coaching, technical coaching and programming in other sports. Crossfit and weightlifting and martial arts all involving paying for coaching. Throwing in America seems to involve a lot of paid events and coaching. Why shouldn’t we copy them?

11. One of the reason that athletes leave athletics for rugby, strongman or Bobsleigh is that you can make a living from those sports. We need to make athletics pay.

Second, we need better facilities:

1. Halesowen Athletics and Cyclcin club is almost unique in the UK. Its land and facilities are owned by the members. It has a track, throwing area, cycle track, hall and 2 gyms on site. The only thing it is lacking for a thrower is an olympic lifting platform and somewhere to throw in the rain under cover. The UK needs more facilities like this.

2. Throwers need to collaborate with gym owners, strongmen, Crossfit boxes and MMA dojo to develop facilities that allow better access to the weights room and throwing facilities. If more people can be recruited into places like this and see throwing being done, then more people will probably enter the sport.

3. We need facilities a bit like Garage Strength in America. Weight lifting coaching and throws coaching all in one place and a significant online presence sharing the performance of their athletes. https://www.youtube.com/@GarageStrength

4. We need facilities like they have in other countries. Places with a track, indoor and outdoor throwing areas, with a gym onsite, that athletes can use 7 days a week 12h a day if they want to. And these facilities need to be reasonably cheap to use because an athlete needs to spend a significant amount of time training. If I owned a facility like this I would probably start with a £3/day fee and see if that was feasible. Then I might charge more for classes and even more for specific 1:1 analysis.

We need to recruit more athletes!

1. We need to recruit athletes out of other sports. There are plenty of teenagers who are dropped from football academies, or don’t make the rugby development squads. Athlete recruiters need to be going along to these events and show casing athletics as an alternative sport.

2. Other sports can be used as gateway drugs into athletics - park run, rugby, football, weight lifting, CrossFit, strongman, Highland Games - all of these sports have people who could be good athletes. 

3. We need to make it easier for people to become coaches. There should be a check to make sure they arent a criminal and that they have some technical skills. But the current system is far too demanding, faffy and time consuming and is most certainly putting people off becoming coaches.

4. We need to develop national screening programmes, like the rowers and cyclists use to find younger people with the potential to be great athletes. So a throwers screening programme might involved a simple survey - your current age, weight and height. Your parents height. Your 60m sprint time, vertical high jump, standing long jump and overhead throw scores. Then kids who are likely to be tall and have powerful scores could be recruited to try throwing. 

And Lastly…. do we need more team ethos?

Most people like team sports. Athletics is mostly an individualists sport. Even when competing for a club, its mostly all about how you perform. Some events list sprints and middle distance might have a team ethos because the athletes are run and train together. But for other events you can often feel quite isolated even if you are technically part of “the team”. This can be quite off putting for more introverted people or younger athletes, who don’t want to feel isolated for hours at a time.

I would absolutely love to start a Team Throws competition!

My proposal would be to copy the highland games, hyrox, crossfit and strongman and bring some of these aspects into throwing.

The first competition would involve - shot putt, javelin, hammer, discus, weight for heigh and weight for distance. 6 events.

Teams of 6 athletes would enter. Each person must compete in each even. Each event has points for distances like in Decathlon.

Then at the end of the competition, the winning team wins prize money. And the winner of each individual event wins prize money as well. And maybe even prize money/ refunds for people who hit a certain distance.

Charge each person £10-20 to enter. And some of this money can go to paying officials properly and the rest can go to overheads and prize money.

This sort of competition would involve a tactial selection of team members, do you have 3 great shot putters to score max points or do you try to select one athlete for each event?

Obviously the whole event would be recorded and clips posted all over social media to try and drive up interest.

I’d allow teams to be made up of anyone. So you could have 6 people competing from a traditional athletics club against 6 throwers from a throws group against a collection of complete amateurs against a stag do against a group from a company against a team put together by Sky for the “Sky throwing team” just like in cycling.

Doesn’t that sound like fun?

If anyone is keen, let me know because I am sure we could host the inaugural Team Throws Cup at Halesowen!

https://www.instagram.com/reel/CrwHTt8oNRV/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link

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