Category Archives: Jim Lusted

How does educational background shape Olympic success?

By Jim Lusted

You don’t have to have attended private school to be a member of the British Olympic team for Tokyo 2020 – but it may have helped, particularly for some Olympic events. Dr Jim Lusted, Lecturer in Sport & Fitness, explores the role that educational background can have in athletes reaching the highest levels of Olympic sports like rowing, hockey and archery.

Rowing crew

The level playing field of sport

The Olympic games provides an opportunity for us to witness some sporting achievements that push ever further the boundaries of human performance limits – with only the very best claiming Olympic gold.

Sport is a meritocracy, right? That is, the most successful sportspeople achieve their awards because they deserve them – they are the fastest, strongest, most talented and/or hardworking of their generation, and the sporting competition determines the best from the rest. Who can argue, for example, that the person who reaches the finishing line first in the 100m sprint doesn’t deserve their victory? It’s an alluring idea that draws many of us to watch and enjoy elite sport events – perhaps never more so than a summer Olympics like the delayed Tokyo 2020 games.

The strong connection between sport and meritocracy is in part because it is so obvious – and yet you may already have thought of some examples where the winner might not have always been the ‘best’ athlete. Take the infamous sporting doping cases like Canadian sprinter Ben Johnson, US cyclist Lance Armstrong and more recently the whole Russian Olympic programme. These – and many more – would certainly challenge the ideas that Olympic ‘winners’ achieve their success on hard work and talent alone. It is also not uncommon to hear the world’s best athletes talk about how they were never the best in their sport at school – but somehow they had ‘made it’ to success as an adult while others had fallen away as they grew up.

The influence of school background

Sutton trust chart - education of medallists
There are, of course, a range of complex factors that can influence people’s opportunity to fulfil their athletic potential and then go on to compete at the very highest levels. One of these might be an athlete’s own educational background. What school you attend might not be immediately significant, yet it seems to have an impact on who ends up competing for Britain at the Olympic games. Across the UK, independent (private fee-charging) schools educate 6.5% of the total school-age population (ISC 2021). However, research completed by The Sutton Trust just after the 2016 Rio Summer Olympics found that 36% of British athletes who won medals had attended independent (private, fee paying) schools compared with 60% who attended comprehensive (state funded) schools (with the remaining 8% coming from Grammar schools – usually free to attend but with a selective entrance policy of some kind).

For some Olympic sports, including rowing and women’s hockey, the majority of medal winners in 2016 had been privately educated. In others, former state or Grammar school pupils dominated the medals, such as cycling where only 8% of medallists had studied at an independent school in 2016.

This research also looked at the figures for the London 2012 Olympics and saw a slight increase in the proportion of state school medallists in 2016 – it will be interesting to see how the figures compare again with Tokyo 2020. We should be a little cautious of reading too much into the statistical trends given the relatively low numbers involved being open to fluctuation. But educational background seems influential, particularly in some sports.

Why is educational background important?

The substantial over-representation of privately educated athletes as British Olympians is probably of no particular surprise; certainly, many independent schools use sport to market the desirability of their education, by investing heavily in expensive specialist facilities and infrastructure and emphasising the priority placed on pupil participation in PE and sport. This investment often includes paying for particular coaching expertise along with ring-fencing additional time in and out of the school day for sport training and competition. Sport in the state sector has always compared poorly in such sporting provision and the gap is arguably getting wider, particularly since the promising School Sports Partnership scheme which was set up in the early 2000s to grow PE and school sport in the state sector was closed down by government in 2010 (Lusted, 2014).

 

Young women playing hockey

‘Buying’ access through social capital

But it is not just economic investment that can shape the sporting journeys of the most promising athletes attending private and state schools. As social theorist Pierre Bourdieu has observed, there are other forms of ‘capital’ (not only economic) that are available to some people to ‘buy’ access to (and power in) sport (Bourdieu 1988). We can draw on one of these forms – ‘social’ capital – to explore more deeply why some sports appear to be more accessible to some than others, and the role that education plays in this process.

Social capital refers to the networks of contacts, friendships and relationships that can help gain access to spaces and opportunities that we may not otherwise have. In this respect, the interconnections of private school teachers, coaches, parents and other relatives and local (often professional) sports club contacts can often help smooth an athlete’s journey to further progression. For sports such as cricket, hockey, archery and rowing, talent pathways are heavily informed by the inter-personal and organisational connections that congregate around independent school environments (and often, later, the associated elite Universities such as Oxford and Cambridge). Access is therefore often secured not only by an individual’s outstanding sporting talent, but by being in a position to ‘cash in’ regularly throughout one’s career development on the networks of social capital that such pupils have to hand. This allows us to entertain the idea that the different educational background of two otherwise equally talented young athletes might lead them on different athletic journeys.

Breaking the cycle of the traditional pathways to success

For Bourdieu, networks like these can be extremely difficult to break into without the ‘right’ social capital. It is not just a case of ‘talking to the right person’ or ‘getting in with the right crowd’ – such social capital is slowly accrued over time, is often informal, rarely acknowledged but heavily guarded by those who possess it. This can help explain why such networks are reproduced over time and can create long-term trends in sport participation.

Sport organisations are starting to recognise the often ‘exclusive’ nature of traditional pathways for some sports and have more recently looked to widen their talent identification programmes beyond their usual sites in the search for the next gold medallist. UK Sport’s ‘Fromhome2theGames’ offers an opportunity for all young people to be considered for development in one of many Olympic sports, initially just by completing 3 online physical tests. Whether this open-access approach can significantly challenge the existing development networks of some sports remains to be seen. Perhaps more of the next generation of British Olympians will be able to buck participation trends and find their educational background was lower down on the list of reasons for their eventual sporting success.

 

This article was originally posted on OpenLearn.

Uncovering Britain’s Lost Black Sporting Heroes

By Jim Lusted

If you’re a sport enthusiast like me, you will claim to know a lot about sport. After all, we dedicate much of our waking lives obsessing over our favourite sports, teams and players. So, let’s test your sporting knowledge out on these questions:

  1. Which International Boxing Hall-of-Famer was an usher at the coronation of George IV in 1821?
  2. Which footballer made her debut for the British Ladies football team in 1895 and for many years was mistakenly called Carrie Boustead?
  3. Which England Rugby Union player was dropped because opponents South Africa refused to play against him?

Hats off to you if you spotted Bill Richmond, Emma Clarke and Jimmy Peters – you are likely to be one of the very few! If none of these names immediately spring to mind it isn’t because you’ve not been paying attention. Until very recently, they were pretty much unheard of. They are all Black sportspeople from Britain’s past and, like many others, their stories have generally been forgotten, untold and uncelebrated. This isn’t something limited to sport – there is a widespread absence of Black history in popular accounts of British history, as discussed in a 2016 BBC series ‘Black and British: A Forgotten History ’ currently being repeated on the iPlayer platform.

Slowly, we are (re)discovering Black British sporting figures and their fascinating stories. Increasingly we see profiles emerge of these forgotten sporting icons in the media, often as content created to mark Black History Month. But what do the historic achievements of Black sportspeople tell us about the relationship between ‘race’, racism and sport, and why haven’t their often-extraordinary stories been woven into British sporting folklore and memory?

Take Bill Richmond, for example. Only very dedicated followers of boxing history will know of him – at least until recently, as the story of the ‘first black sporting icon in history’ has emerged. Richmond’s story is a fascinating one in itself, but it is illustrative in that it shows how sport can challenge – in an often fleeting and highly contingent way – the racial politics of a particular historical period.

Born into slavery in the USA in 1763, at the age of 13, Richmond was taken to York, England by a British army commander and provided with an education – highly unusual at the time. He later moved, with his Yorkshire wife, to London to live with and work for Thomas Pitt, cousin of then Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger. By 1821 he had seemingly reached the highest levels of British gentry, becoming an usher at the coronation of King George IV. His 2015 biography, ‘Richmond Unchained ’, suggests that much of this astonishing journey was down to his special talent for boxing – in those days a brutal, bare-knuckled version of the sport hugely popular among all sections of British society including the aristocracy. That Thomas Pitt was a boxing enthusiast was no coincidence, and around the turn of the nineteenth century, Richmond gained a reputation and a following as he won a series of prize fights against well-known and highly regarded opponents. He later ran a boxing academy where, it is said, he trained high profile establishment figures including Lord Byron.

Would Richmond have achieved such a social standing without his sporting prowess? Being a Black person in nineteenth-century England he faced widespread racial discrimination – put into context, he died some 4 years before slavery was legally abolished in the UK in 1833. His early boxing experiences appear to have come from violent brawls he endured as a result of the persistent racist abuse and insults he suffered. So while sport opened up some unlikely opportunities, it by no means protected him from the racist realities of the day.

Richmond’s biographer, Luke Williams, rightly observes that it is ‘a staggering collective omission by sports and social historians that the story of Bill Richmond has scarcely been told’. So why has it taken over 175 years for his life and career to emerge? For this we should consider how exactly history is crafted – who decides which figures and which stories are preserved, and what historical narratives take precedence over others. In the aforementioned BBC series, historian David Olusoga claims that British history has been ‘whitewashed’, with the presence and influence of Black Britons largely ignored. This partial history reinforces the idea of Britain as a ‘white’ country and downplays its long-standing, complex connections with Africa and other parts of the world. It also serves to divert attention away from the relationship between modern industrial Britain’s economic success, its leading role in the Atlantic Slave Trade and its often violent, exploitative colonial rule.

These historical narratives also perpetuate a crude racialised hierarchy between white and black. The stories that underpin this ‘whitewashed’ history are selected because they conform to this frame – so that influential, successful Black figures in British history are conveniently forgotten while tales of powerful and heroic white people (usually men) are remembered and re-imagined. As Black British poet Benjamin Zephaniah says:

“I wasn’t interested in history at school, because I was being taught that black people had no history. We were usually being “discovered” by great white explorers, civilised by the great white conquerors and missionaries, or freed by the great white abolitionists.”

It is certainly a positive sign that figures such as Bill Richmond, Emma Clarke and Jimmy Peters are being re-discovered and their achievements are finally being recognised. Celebrating the lives of prominent Black figures – including sportspeople – in Britain’s past can play an important role in re-balancing the dominant historical narrative of British history and will begin to help us appreciate the plurality and complexity of influences that shape Britain today.

References

Black and British: A Forgotten History (2016) BBC Two. Available at: BBC iPlayer https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b082x0h6 (Accessed: 20 October 2020).

Williams, L. (2015) ‘Richmond Unchained: The Biography of the World’s First Black Sporting Superstar’. Stroud: Amberley Publishing.

Williams, L. (2015) ‘Bill Richmond: The Black Boxer wowed the Court of George IV And taught Lord Byron To spar’, The Independent, 26 August. Available at: https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/history/bill-richmond-black-boxer-wowed-court-george-iv-and-taught-lord-byron-spar-10473577.html (Accessed: 20 October 2020).

Zephaniah, B. (2020) ‘Black people will not be respected until our history is respected’, The Guardian, 12 October. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/oct/12/black-people-history-respected-teachers-police-benjamin-zephaniah (Accessed: 20 October 2020).

This article was originally posted on OpenLearn