Niels de Vos, UK Athletics – SM – Ian Freeman

Niels de Vos, who joined UK Athletics (UKA), the sport’s national governing body, as chief executive in May this year, is a rarity in sports management - someone shot through with a marketing culture that provides a dynamic combination of verve and acumen. Scratch beneath the surface, though, and there, alongside, lurks a committed sports professional.

De Vos leaves you in no doubt that, first and foremost, he’s running a business. Athletes are, to him, performers - entertainers who pull in the audience.

Of his previous post as CEO of rugby union premiership side, Sale Sharks, he says “I knew nothing about rugby, never played or watched it and had no interest in it, but I got to understand the dynamics between a head coach, the players and the supporters. The players were my marketing department, so they have to have faith in you as CEO.”

De Vos sees in his UKA role a raft of similarities both with Sale and his previous position as commercial director of the successful Manchester 2002 Commonwealth Games. “In 2002 I had a 38,000 stadium to fill – previously, the biggest crowd was 17,000 at Crystal Palace” he says. “There were a lot of doubters, but we managed to do it!”

De Vos’s initial chariot of fire was this summer’s IAAF Athletics World Championships in Japan, where he judged Team GB’s performance to be “satisfactory - performance in business is measured in a variety of currencies and ours is medals” he says, “but I was more interested in the numbers finishing in the top eight. We were almost on target, with 17 finalists.

“Those finalists represent our like-for-like sales, the true measure of how our business is performing, rather than medals which are the equivalent of a snap-shot balance sheet” he says, the marketer overtaking the sportsman for the first of many times during our chat.

De Vos, you sense, would have loved to have got his hands on the business operation of Osaka. “The Japanese got the economics wrong and misread their own market-place on ticket prices” he says. “In a city the size of Osaka, nine days is too long to have to fill a 55,000-capacity stadium morning and evening.”

He reckons some weak sessions resulted in not only low gates but unhappy spectators. “My director of performance will kill me” he muses, “but sometimes you have to think about the audience as well as the sport. Athletics is entertainment too.”

Negativity driven by dyed-in-the-wool, downbeat press coverage is a de Vos bugbear. “UK athletics isn’t in a bad state, even in comparison to past generations. For example, we’re winning the same number of medals as ever at world youth championships. Athletics is strong and vibrant, and has a distinct place in our sporting fabric.”

With less than a year to go of UKA’s BBC contract, and with his background firmly entrenched in rights marketing, de Vos-the-businessman is looking forward to getting his teeth into TV coverage negotiations. Relations with our national broadcaster became somewhat strained following UKA’s chairman, Ed Warner’s, remarks that BBC coverage of Osaka suffered from "staleness and tiredness”.

“The whole BBC issue was completely over-blown” de Vos says, “but our points were echoed by some people in the BBC. No criticism of the BBC was intended at all, but anyone in any business has to look at themselves and think ‘Are we as fresh as we could be?’.”

Other broadcasters are in the running and De Vos comments “We’ll always be an interesting commercial proposition, because I believe we’re pretty much the only sport where men and women are treated truly equally. Kelly, Paula and Mary are known and recognised just by their first names. We have strong brand values, which is why people like to ally their brand with ours. We get good audience figures on TV, but we could do better.”

One area where de Vos sees a weakness is the ability to convert high-level junior performers to high-level senior ones. He feels the governing body can make a difference by doing more for people who achieve through perspiration and effort rather than those such as Sebastian Coe and Daley Thompson, who are perceived as having “an unbelievable natural talent. We have to get young people into the sport, keep them there and develop them through.

“We must create an aspirational pathway” de Vos says, tut-tutting that the phrase is “bloody marketing-speak but I can’t think of any other way to put it!

“If you’re a kid and a great 800 metre runner, where’s your inspiration? If you’re a footballer, you can say I want to play in the Premiership, and for England in the World Cup. No kid dreams of waking up in the morning and pulling on a Birchfield Harriers vest!

“We have create somewhere for the best athletes - academies or high-performance centres - and we have to remove chance from the sport, because when you ask athletes and coaches how they met, it was usually by chance. We have to find kids who are good, put our arms around them, say ‘you can be an Olympian’ and point them in the right direction.”

De Vos is not blind to the scale of the job at UKA, which as an entity turns over around £20 million a year. Sixty percent of income derives from partnerships with Norwich Union and several second-tier sponsors, with the balance achieved from grants from Sport England and the National Lottery via UK Sport.

“At Sale Sharks” says de Vos “it was easy to motivate the management to be business-driven, since every pound they saved was a pound that could be spent on players. It’s not quite the same here – there is no direct link between how we run the business and the performance, so it’s harder for us to keep our team focused.

“Our sport isn’t weekly, so you have longer to get things right if they go wrong – but potentially much longer to rest on your laurels if things go well. Like with all sport, for every pound we spend we have to get three or four pounds-worth back so we leverage every opportunity we have.”

Drug-related issues, in particular the Christine Ohuruogu affair, dominated athletics news coverage just prior to Osaka and her appeal against a lifetime Olympic ban is still pending as I discuss the matter with de Vos. Ed Warner recently noted “Let's not forget she has never ever failed a drugs test and she has taken many, many tests in the past year.”

“No one expected that level of vitriol” de Vos says “and there seems to be a wilful misrepresentation of what happened. She didn’t miss the drug tests deliberately because she didn’t know when they were going to happen, but the coverage was heavy in the implication. The BOA bylaw says anyone who is guilty of a drugs offence is banned for life, but that’s not if you miss it only if you fail it.”

“Having said that” he sighs, “I fully support the tests being as rigorous as they are. She did fuck up, but it would be a great shame if her appeal is turned down.”

So, as 2012 creeps ever closer, and with de Vos promising no major changes of focus for Beijing 2008 – aside of the return of Paula Radcliffe and Dean Macey – how best to ready ourselves for London?

“It’s a critical event for our future, but I don’t subscribe to the apocalyptical vision of a bad UK athletics performance in London meaning a bad Olympics – Australia’s athletes did badly in Sydney [in 2000] but it was a fantastic Olympics.

“Our target is to have a British athlete in fifty percent of the finals, which is a hell of an ask as there’s currently so many events where we’re not represented.” De Vos feels some may damn this objective as paucity of ambition, but, he says “other sports would die to achieve it - the LTA’s aspiration, with all their wealth, is to get two men in the world’s top 100!”

His passion now over-riding both business and sport, he says “We have to market ourselves better, tell our story better, explain to people that Jo Pavey finishing fourth in the 10,000 metres is not another ‘heroic British failure’ – it’s an absolutely unbelievable achievement! We’re one of the most successful sports in the country, but people still talk about ‘the state of British athletics’! Watching the London Marathon or a five-set match at Wimbledon makes you appreciate the effort the athletes put in, whereas a 50-second sprint is gone…” – he snaps his fingers – “…like that.” 

De Vos admits the UK’s weakness in field events, calling, salesman-like, for an “improvement in our product range” in time for London. “There are reasons” he says, “why we’ve never won medals in the heavy throws, but you can’t change the gene pool overnight. We can try to build skills but it sure as hell ain’t going to be easy.”

UKA is enhancing performance through the ‘Power of Ten’ (POT) rankings initiative, a drive to provide greater strength and depth in British athletics rather than relying on a handful of individuals who excel. After careful analysis of world, UK and regional standards and trends, a clear picture has been built up of the progress needed to produce more world-class athletes. The POT website now details over 250,000 performances from 40,000 athletes

“Performance ratings are significantly better than last year” de Vos says, “and I’m certain one of the reasons is that there’s a whole generation of kids thinking ‘maybe…just maybe.” What we have to do is harvest a good crop of people and keep them interested in the sport after the Games. It would be disastrous if we thought our job was done after 2012.”

De Vos confesses to not being that close to the London Organising Committee of the Olympic Games (LOCOG), with their dealings being confined to the Stadium. He is an admirer, though, of the LOCOG team who, he says, have a tough job ahead – “I know, I’ve done it!”

“There’s always a lot of misinformation about budgets around major events” says de Vos, “and to talk about ‘the budget for the Olympics’ is a lazy piece of journalism. LOCOG’s budget for the delivery of the games has hardly increased since it was put together – the escalation has come in the Olympic Delivery Authority’s plans for infrastructure, which have a broader benefit for the nation.”

With ‘legacy’ the current Olympic buzzword, de Vos views the Stadium’s future with typical realism. “We want it to be the place where people aspire to be, as Wembley is for footballers. We want it to be the home of athletics, but we may only need it 20 days a year so it’s important LOCOG has a business plan to ensure it works.”

The sport’s future spearheads de Vos’s vision, and he fears it may fail without giving itself a bit of a metaphorical kicking. “If there’s an 18 year-old who’s too good for their local athletics club but not yet good enough for the European golden league circuit, where do they play their sport?” he asks, pointedly.

“At the moment the big incentive is 2012, but after that, people will get fed up with travelling around the country to run in empty stadiums in a race they know they’ll win anyway. They might even drift out of sport altogether. We must aspire to create a level of competition in the UK that’s interesting to athletes and to the sports-viewing public - to create a buzz around athletics as other sports do.

“The government is on our side - by next year there will be 450 sport competition co-ordinators who will cover all the country’s schools through development partnerships. We have to make people remember that athletics is at the core of physical literacy. You have to first find an athlete - then you can teach them to pass or kick a ball.

“Changing the culture of a sport won’t happen overnight, but once we can train middle-class parents to use an athletics club as a proper sporting environment for their kids and not as a cheap crèche, then we’ll make a real difference.”

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