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LONDON — British teams in eight Olympics sports had their funding slashed on Thursday, raising fears that the host nation will be unable to field a team in every sport at the 2012 London Olympics.
Four Paralympics sports also had their funding cut for the 2012 Games due to a budget shortfall of 50 million pounds.
The allocation for shooting -- a sport in which Britain performed poorly at the Beijing Olympics -- suffered a severe cut of 3.8 million pounds, forcing the team to be slimmed down from 46 funded athletes to around 10.
Water polo was hit with a 50-percent reduction to 1.45 million pounds, sparking warnings that the British team, who are far below world-class standards, may miss out on a rare chance to participate in an Olympics in 2012.
"It's pretty bleak. We think the absolute cheapest you could do it on would be about 2.5 million pounds," water polo performance director Nick Hume told the BBC.
"We've got some tough decisions to make but we'll not rush into them, and we'll explore every possible avenue."
Last month funding agency UK Sport increased its financial support to many Olympic sports, including the successful cycling team which won 14 medals in Beijing last year. But the funding gap for more minor sports arose after a government campaign failed to raise any money from the private sector struggling with the effects of the global recession.
Sue Campbell, the head of UK Sport, said: "It was vital that, having successfully targeted our medal prospects, we also maximised the chances of every sport for London 2012 within our limited resources."
Beth Haller, Ph.D., is Co-Director of the Global Alliance for Disability in Media and Entertainment (www.gadim.org). A former print journalist, she is a member of the Advisory Board for the National Center on Disability and Journalism (https://ncdj.org/). Haller is Professor Emerita in the Department of Mass Communication at Towson University in Maryland, USA. Haller is co-editor of the 2020 "Routledge Companion to Disability and Media" (with Gerard Goggin of University of Sydney & Katie Ellis of Curtin University, Australia). She is author of "Representing Disability in an Ableist World: Essays on Mass Media" (Advocado Press, 2010) and the author/editor of Byline of Hope: Collected Newspaper and Magazine Writing of Helen Keller (Advocado Press, 2015). She has been researching disability representation in mass media for 30+ years. She is adjunct faculty in the Disability Studies programs at the City University of New York (CUNY) and the University of Texas-Arlington.
From AFP:
