THE HERALD REPORTS
Boyle fires out a stark warning

DOUG GILLON October 17 2005

IF athletics were a business, it would be bankrupt, says Tommy Boyle. This brutal observation, coming as it does from the man who coached two of Scotland's most successful athletes of the past quarter-century, is hard to rebut and all the more pertinent when you consider that Boyle is a survivor in one of the most competitive industries in the world.
He is operations manager of the NEC factory at Livingston, last major production plant of its kind in Scotland, turning out 4500 personal computers every day and employing 400 people.
Boyle believes that, until athletics operates on business lines and buries its culture of blame and infighting, it will continue to stagnate. He steered Tom McKean and Yvonne Murray to European and world titles at 800 and 3000 metres indoors and out, and this year guided Susan Scott to the world championship semi-finals in Helsinki. She is Scotland's most successful two-lap runner since McKean, who first hit the headlines in the early 1980s.
Boyle is not the only critic to identify that, despite the advent of the lottery, Scottish Institute of Sport and a more proactive sportscotland, athletics has fewer world-class competitors now than 25 years ago. However, he is one of very few to offer constructive practical suggestions on how to reverse that.
Money is clearly not the simple answer, for two of the most underperforming sports are those which have had most resources thrown at them.
Like it or not, sport has become a business, and even well-supported major sports and clubs, managed by experienced entrepreneurs, cannot make ends meet. The new chief executive of the Scottish Rugby Union said just days ago that because of mismanagement he was unable to forecast when the SRU would clear their £21m debt. Rangers and Celtic may be less deeply in the red than formerly, but the Ibrox debt was confirmed this year at £23m and Parkhead's at a fraction under £20m.
Not that Boyle offers any judgment of rugby or football. Outside his work and family, athletics remains his passion. So it is not surprising that he bristles with frustration when he says: "McKean was better supported more than 20 years ago than Susan Scott is now. That can't be right when the system is supposed to have changed so radically for the better."
Then, private sponsorship from car dealer Glen Henderson helped assemble a personal support team for two athletes akin to the programmes which SIS now operates for all sports, though with less spectacular results thus far for athletics.
Boyle says he has been "much more involved with SIS in the past year and they've helped get Susan into appropriate races. We needed to do that because, to be frank, the people at UKA Athletics who are charged with the job, and paid to do so, simply were not doing it."
Fourth in the 2002 Commonwealth Games, where she broke the 30-year-old Scottish record, Scott is a work in progress and one of few banker Scottish athletics finalists for Melbourne next March, but when we spoke at his West Lothian base, Boyle focused on the future of his sport and what he believes it must learn from industry.
His laptop screen overflows with icons of files on key performance indicators from his workplace. Charts on his office wall tell a similar story. The whereabouts of every component in the range of pcs being assembled, and the status of every order, is among a raft of data being monitored every 15 minutes. Yes, every 15 minutes.
"I am deeply analytical because of my background in statistics, engineering and management," he says, "but athletics needs to be much more analytical of its own performance. I tell the workforce here that we are in the survival business and get criticised by human resources for that. But it's a fact, and I believe in telling folk how it is. If athletics was a business, it would be out of business. I don't want to hip shoot, but the whole thing needs to be looked at."
The Livingston plant which he runs has doubled productivity with a smaller workforce, and lowered costs and prices to such effect that it was the company's mother factory which reduced its numbers when the Scottish one was widely touted for closure. "It is people-driven and athletics is a great parallel," insists Boyle. "A huge culture change is required, and you don't do that easily. It took us at least two years. Part of the package is giving people ownership. That has to be true for athletics as well.
"Athletics is always talking about how good it used to be and why are we not like that now. That needs to stop. We also need to stop criticising coaches for not producing the goods when fundamentally they don't have the infrastructure to meet today's requirements.
"I am not interested in the politics of sport. I know politics, but my interest in it is over. However, unless government takes a more pro-active role, and increases school physical education provision, we are doomed anyway. Numbers coming in are dropping and so is the basic fitness of those kids. So the raw material for coaches is poorer and poorer.
"I believe we are doomed to mediocrity unless we change. The London Olympics in 2012 and Commonwealth Games, hopefully in 2014 in Glasgow, are opportunities we must grab. It is a moment in time. If we don't, athletics will have egg on its face when Britain are hosts. With a great deal of effort, Scotland could just about do it."

This article was posted on 17-Oct-2005, 21:55 by Hugh Barrow.