‘We’re all in this together’ insists GB badminton chief Adrian Christy

Adrian Christy, chief executive of Badminton England, fears a singular focus, rather than one that incorporates all of sport, could be damaging to some sports which bring in less revenue and sponsorship.

Badminton England, like all Olympic governing bodies, is already faced with a 12-month funding gap due to the Tokyo Games and Paralympics being pushed back a year because of the coronavirus pandemic.

And even though Christy’s organisation are a lot more self-sufficient than they were four years ago when UK Sport pulled funding worth £5.7m, they are keen for parity across the sector to ensure as many events survive these unprecedented times.

“It doesn’t matter what sport it is, whether it is the giant of football like the Premier League or a very small sport – professional athletes want to return to training and to competition, and we can only do that when the government, and the science that is leading the government, says it is time to do so,” Christy told The Yorkshire Post.

“Because of the scale of the Premier League there is an enormous amount of pressure being applied from clubs, from broadcasters, from sponsors, from fans as well to an extent – but what we can’t create is a rule for one, one rule for another.

“Why should Harry Kane and Ben Stokes get back to training any quicker than Lauren Smith (leading English badminton player)? The principal of that is our athletes are equally chomping at the bit to return to training and government shouldn’t be looking at having an exception for football because the noise is so great.

“If it’s fine for football to return, it should be fine for badminton to return. If it’s not right for badminton to return, it shouldn’t be right for any sport to return.

“It’s a bit like saying Tesco’s can open because they’ve got a bigger revenue than the corner shop, but that corner shop might be just as important to some people.

“There’s a lot of noise in the media about the Premier League wanting to return. But if everybody starts doing their own thing, then you break down what we’re all trying to do.”

Badminton England have had to redefine themselves as a governing body following the shock announcement in December 2016 – just four months after Huddersfield’s Marcus Ellis won a bronze in the men’s doubles at Rio – that the sport would have all of its funding cut.

After a public outcry, some of the funding was restored, but a harsh lesson was learnt.

“It was the wrong decision that was taken at the time, but we took a view that we shouldn’t ever be so reliant on government funding again,” said Christy.

“In order to mitigate any further loss of funding in the future, we had to diversify our funding streams.

“We’ve done that very successfully with the National Badminton Centre, a small hotel we run on site and we have a health club. All those funding streams are currently cut off, but at the time of the Rio Games we were 80 per cent reliant on government funding, now it’s just 55 per cent.”

Christy does forecast that Badminton England face a £1m shortfall in income this year due to the shutdown, but he has reason to be optimisitc, off and on the court.

In Lauren Smith, Huddersfield’s Ellis and Leeds’s Gabby Adcock and her husband Chris, the governing body hope to have plenty of representatives at the rescheduled Tokyo Olympics.

“Qualification ended this week and we’d have been qualifying players in every discipline,” he said.

“When we took that hit post-Rio, never in a million years did I think we’d do that, I never thought we’d be able to make that happen.

“We kept the programme going, slowly rebuilt it and put our athletes into a very strong position. We’ve just got to ride through this storm.”

Editor’s note: first and foremost - and rarely have I written down these words with more sincerity - I hope this finds you well.

Almost certainly you are here because you value the quality and the integrity of the journalism produced by The Yorkshire Post’s journalists - almost all of which live alongside you in Yorkshire, spending the wages they earn with Yorkshire businesses - who last year took this title to the industry watchdog’s Most Trusted Newspaper in Britain accolade.

And that is why I must make an urgent request of you: as advertising revenue declines, your support becomes evermore crucial to the maintenance of the journalistic standards expected of The Yorkshire Post. If you can, safely, please buy a paper or take up a subscription. We want to continue to make you proud of Yorkshire’s National Newspaper but we are going to need your help.

Postal subscription copies can be ordered by calling 0330 4030066 or by emailing [email protected]. Vouchers, to be exchanged at retail sales outlets - our newsagents need you, too - can be subscribed to by contacting subscriptions on 0330 1235950 or by visiting www.localsubsplus.co.uk where you should select The Yorkshire Post from the list of titles available.

If you want to help right now, download our tablet app from the App / Play Stores. Every contribution you make helps to provide this county with the best regional journalism in the country.

Sincerely. Thank you.

James Mitchinson

Editor