British Olympic Team ‘Too White’ Claims Sport England Board Member

TOKYO, JAPAN - JULY 30: (L-R) Silver medalist Kye Whyte and gold medalist Bethany Shriever
Ezra Shaw/Getty Images
Kurt Zindulka

The British Olympic team is too white and too suburban, said a board member of Sport England, who has called for a “revolution” in how athletes are selected for the games.

Chris Grant, one of British sport’s most senior black administrators, has said that racism and “unconscious bias” are to blame for the ethnic mix of British competitors.

While Team GB was comprised of about 86 per cent white athletes in the Tokyo Games, roughly equivalent to the population as a whole, Grant said potential Olympians from the inner city are overlooked, with about half of the athletes having been educated in private schools.

“There is overt racism through sport and activity at every level – of course there is. Sport has a massive heritage of exclusion,” the Sport England board member told The Guardian, citing a rule that was abolished in 1948 that required boxers to have two white parents as an example.

“Team GB, Paralympics GB and their support teams do not look and sound like the whole population – that is absurd, but I think the challenge is that people don’t think it’s absurd,” he asserted.

Grant said that progress in diversifying the British Olympic team has been “painfully slow and difficult”.

“Part of the reason it hasn’t happened is that some of the people who are in positions of power don’t really believe it can happen. And part of that, frankly, is unconscious bias,” he said.

“Tokyo has demonstrated yet again that we have amazing talent development pathways, but that the gateways to elite sport are not fairly distributed. We need investment to change that, but more than anything we need vision, ambition and will,” Grant added.

Grant is now spearheading “Mission 2032”, a project aimed at increasing diversity in the British Olympic squad through increased transparency in the selection data.

Prior to the Tokyo Games, UK Sport already targeted the budgets of sports perceived as “posh”, such as sailing, rowing, and equestrianism in order to promote a more diverse range of sports.

The chief executive of UK Sport, Sally Munday said: “This is an absolute priority for us and our sports know we will be taking it into consideration when we make decisions about funding.

“You’ll see it black and white in the strategy because we mean it, we’re prepared to be measured on it and held to account for it. It’s where we want to go and the sports are all coming to the party to work with us on it.”

The ‘Rainbow’ Tokyo Olympic games saw its ratings plummet, with Breitbart News’ John Nolte dubbing the games the “Woketard Olympics” in which political gestures from BLM-inspired taking the knee have been blamed for steep declines in viewership.

The final two nights of the games both hit record low ratings with only 14.6 million people watching the NBC telecast in America on Saturday. The record low ratings were then topped on Sunday, with an all-time low of just 13.3 million people tuning in.

Undeterred by the backlash against the woke Olympics, the organisers of the upcoming 2024 games in France have already vowed to place an increased onus on gender and identity politics, with the International Olympic Committee (IOC) saying that they are “keen to set a new standard for inclusive, gender-balanced and youth-centred games” in Paris.

Follow Kurt Zindulka on Twitter here @KurtZindulka

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