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Enterprise and Culture Committee, 13 Mar 2007

13 Mar 2007 · S2 · Enterprise and Culture Committee

Item of business

Sport 21 and Sports Policy

Dougie Donnelly: Watch on SPTV

I congratulate everyone who was involved in producing "Reaching Higher", which is an impressive and excellent piece of work, and I welcome the Executive's closer involvement with sport. My only possible issue with the document is that high-performance sport has a fairly low profile in it, although that may not be a problem given what the document aimed to achieve. People will not be surprised to hear me claim that high-performance sport presents a slightly different challenge.A far-sighted minister for sport and a far-sighted chair of sportscotland set up the Scottish Institute of Sport some years ago. They deliberately set it up not to be simply a department of sportscotland; instead, they wanted it to be different and separate from sportscotland to a degree, with a separate chairman and board of directors and the involvement of high-profile and well-qualified people, such as Ian McGeechan, Frank Dick, Craig Brown and former athletes Alison Ramsay and Sir Bill Gammell. It is important to accept that top sportspeople are different. They are a little obsessive, selfish and self-centred and we must accept that we must treat them a little differently.I am concerned that, because of the understandable concentration on the challenges ahead in London 2012 and Glasgow 2014—assuming that Glasgow wins the bid—we have almost forgotten that there will be Olympic games in less than 18 months' time in Beijing and winter Olympics and Commonwealth games in 2010, which are certainly a priority for the Scottish Institute of Sport. We must perform well in those games before we even think about justifying ourselves in 2012.The numbers that are involved can be a little intimidating. Everyone is intent on producing the biggest Scottish team that can be produced in 2014 and the biggest Scottish representation on a Great Britain team in 2012, as well as the most successful team then, but we must find the numbers to achieve those aims. I will give one statistic. If we are looking for a team of 350 Scots for the 2014 event, we must assume that there will be around 100 track and field athletes then. However, we had 28 track and field athletes in Melbourne. Therefore, we must find 72 new track and field athletes. That is not the job of the Scottish Institute of Sport, which deals with elite sport and performance sport. The governing bodies have a big job on their hands, with help from all of us, to produce those numbers of people.The nightmare scenario is a Scottish Commonwealth games team that is not successful in its own country, a GB Olympic team in 2012 without a proportionate number of Scots and, heaven forbid, a Scottish Ryder cup in 2014 without a Scot on the team. Those issues are all a priority for the institute as it looks at the way ahead for elite sport.

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Enterprise and Culture Committee, 13 Mar 2007

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