Back to Surf Home.British Surfing faces a bleak future as the UK Sports Council pulls the plug on surfing.
The British Surfing Association, the sport's governing body, is to lose its principal sourceof funding - an annual £20,000 grant from the UK Sports Council. Despite the millions being poured into sports and arts from the National Lottery, the UK Sports Council has decided that surfing won't get a penny after 1999.
The implications of the funding cuts are serious. BSA membership fees are likely to double. The BSA Office, presently manned by national director Colin Wilson and his assistant Karen Walton, may have to shut down. Contests like the British Nationals and the British Universities Championships may have to be scaled down, and run by unpaid volunteers. And the monitoring of surf schols may have to be abandoned, leading to the possibility that cowboy operators could set up wherever they liked, which would ovbiously have worrying safety implications.
The BSA was informed of the funding cut in December, in a letter from Robert Eady of the UK Sports Council. In it, he explained that a short list of 55 'partner sports' had been drawn up, and only these sports would recieve funding in the future. Surfing was not on the list. Mr Eady justified the UKSC's decision to exclude surfing by claiming that the sport is "not significant an UK level", and that British surfers have had little or no success internationally.
Colin Wilson, national director of the BSA, says the UK Sports Council simply don't know the facts, and have made the wrong decision. "Surfing is a significant sport in the UK, there's no doubt about that. We estimate that there are about 100,000 surfers, longboarders and bodyboardersin Britain. And last year more than 20,000 surfing lessons were given to people taking up the sport.
It's also not true to say that we haven't done well internationally. We have! Russell Winter, who beagn his career surfing in BSA contests when he was 12, has just become the first European to qualify for the ASP Top 44. And Britain currently has two Junior and two Senior European champions, as well as seven silver medalists."
The first list of UKSC partner sports (the sports which will recieve funding) makes interseting reading. As well as mainstream sports like football, cricket and tennis, there are several which might better be described as 'pastimes'. Caving, sub-aqua and parachuting are all included in the list; but how, you might wonder, do you hold a caving comptition? Other sports on the list cannot even be played in Britain. For example, there are no curling links in England or Wales, only in Scotland; and if you want to go luging or bobsleighing, you'll have to go even further - all the way to Austria in fact, the nearest place you'll find a bobsleigh run! It's also baffling that the UKSC can consider a sport like luge 'significant at UK level', while the British Luge Association freely admits it has only 40-or-so members.
The UKSC's decision to cut funding to surfing is clearly unfair. But whether they can be persuaded to reinstate the grant remains to be seen. What happens next is up to the BSA and its members.
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