Jack Buckner admits the only way is up for UK Athletics after a disastrous set of financial figures left the governing body in a perilous position.
“I’m not going to sit here and say it’s plain sailing because it’s not,” the European 5,000m champion turned chief executive said of a £1.8 million loss which leaves his organisation with just £431,000 in reserves.
“It’s tough, it’s difficult, it’s challenging, there’s no getting away from that. I hope it will be [the low point], it’s my absolute intention that it is, but we’ve work to do.”
Buckner switched from British Swimming in the summer and immediately saw Jake Wightman become champion of the world, with his dad providing the stadium commentary.
It was one of the great stories of this sporting year and was followed by athletics selling out every session at the Commonwealth Games and Britain finishing joint top of the medal table at the European Championships.
But the damage had been done before Buckner’s arrival through, amongst other things, the loss of both lucrative BBC contract and lead sponsor and the need to stump up £600,000 to handle a raft of safeguarding cases.
“Mentally, I was prepared for it,” he said. “The summer was great but as I went from Oregon to Birmingham and onto Munich I was thinking ‘I’m going to need to bottle this for the winter ahead’.
“I knew this time was going to be really hard. I was braced for it. Look, there’s no question mark about the organisation surviving, but we need to take a long hard look at our cost base.
“A couple of senior staff members have already left and we have to look really carefully at what we do in-house and what we out-source. It’s not panic, but we’ve got to be realistic.”
Buckner’s hope was that the pain from UKA’s dire year-end accounts would be more than cushioned by a bumper new sponsorship deal.
But with the deal “99.99 per cent” done, the Truss government delivered its budget and the brand walked away from all sports sponsorship.
“I won’t forget that call in a long time,” said Buckner. “The deal was a big one, a fantastic one. To miss out the way we did was so disheartening.”
Undeterred, Buckner rolled his sleeves up and got stuck into the myriad challenges facing the sport.
He has overseen the return of Stephen Maguire in place of head coach Christian Malcolm and started the process of getting athletes back on side as a key part in the process of building the sport’s underwhelming profile.
He is convinced interest still remains, 25,000 tickets having already been sold for next year’s Diamond League meet at the London Stadium, despite continued rumours UKA might accept a fund-raising deal to quit the venue.
“Who knows what might happen in the future but right now that’s the Olympic Stadium, we are an important tenant and we intend to do a great job in it,” he said defiantly. “That’s our core strategy.”
