The trials of the weekend…

I’ve been away the last ten days, enjoying a break over Easter after hanging up my quiver at the end of my term as Chair of Archery GB.  Leaving the country sadly meant missing trials last weekend, but I returned to a flood of Twitter notifications in connection with them which cannot be answered within the site’s character limit. I am therefore taking to my blog.

The tweet that started it all off read as follows: “British Rowing seem intent on alienating their supporters. Final Trials behind closed doors, media coverage censored. Any comment @markxdavies?” Posted on the morning of Easter Day, it was followed just a few hours later by the first reply, of “Obviously not”, from Philip Collins. Mate, I’m sure your mama told you: you can’t hurry, love. You’ll just have to wait. It was Easter Day and I was on holiday. Sorry for not being there to respond 24/7.

After that, plenty of others waded in. Someone from  Canada commented that, “Don’t see what benefit this has. With times posted – are other nations seeing some innovative technique, boat, oars or rig? They aren’t. Great idea – let’s keep making rowing less accessible to the mainstream sports fan. An already expensive Olympic sport with niche viewership,” while from closer to home in Wallingford, another posted, “Agree. Missed opportunity to showcase to potential domestic audience our excellence without real sporting risk.” 47 people liked the original tweet, and two re-tweeted it.

So, any comment, markxdavies? Well as you ask, I would make three points.

As a starter – and leaving aside the fact that other sports appear to be able to run their own trials and their own training sessions as they please, with no-one batting an eyelid – I would say it is debatable whether not publishing times or allowing live videos is useful (to any future opposition) or not, and therefore whether there is any need for (or anything to be gained from) secrecy.

At the very least, it’s easy to see both sides of the case. I can’t myself see how anything massively useful could be gleaned from people seeing footage. But then, even at a club level, I can think of examples where coaches don’t want other clubs to know how their crews are going. So, as one of the respondents to the original tweet commented, you could understand why we might not want other nations to see too much about our trials, just as they don’t want us to know about theirs.

On that point, it is notable to me from a quick look at what others do, that we in Britain are not an outlier in the stance that we take. The tweeter from Canada, for example, seems not to have noticed that the Canadians appear to publish neither video of racing nor results, which puts them in line with Australia and many others. The Americans have live-streamed in the past, but appear not to have done so this past weekend (although they did subsequently publish results), and they have made explicit that they won’t be doing so either on 16th-19th May or 6-7th July. The Germans, admittedly, are a bit more open – they live-streamed audio (although not pictures) and put results out afterwards. But just as we aren’t the exemplar of transparency, neither are we the most closed: ex-NZ Olympian Eric Murray tweeted the other day about secrecy around NZ trials, saying that until recently not even the competitors were given the times and results. So, while many of us don’t understand the “secrecy thing”, it’s worth noting that international coaches all over the world take a broadly similar view on it.  Meanwhile, aside from streaming and times, it seems to me that when it comes to giving out information, we are way ahead of many other countries’ NGBs on social media – of which, more below.

But to return to the point: for what it’s worth, and speaking personally as an outsider, I would probably publish results and not myself be wary of video footage, particularly with so few opportunities available for people to see the best in the country compete. But the amount that it’s worth, now I think of it, is not a lot. I’m not a Director of Performance, nor part of a coaching team – still less a head coach; and if I were, I think I would consider it would be fair enough for me to be allowed to run my own programme my own way. I suspect I would take that view even if I were a rookie, but I’d think it particularly relevant if I had proved myself capable of coaching crews to lots of medals. Whether someone on Twitter (or indeed the Chair of British Rowing) sees (or doesn’t see) what the benefit is in my holding my cards closer to my chest than they would, is frankly worth not a row a beans. None of us are running the programme. When we are, we can make our own decisions about where benefit can be gained – and if we do so with the same track record of success as our current coaching team, then bully for us.

My second point would be around the issues of accessibility, where I hope it will surprise no-one to know that I agree wholeheartedly about its real importance for us as a sport.  Because of that view, I was absolutely delighted to see what (in my opinion) was some absolutely fabulous photography sent out throughout the day on Instagram – not just by the team at British Rowing (who also put out over 100 tweets over the weekend to keep people in touch, in addition to publishing articles), but rather gloriously from clubs that had competitors of their own. I also loved the marvellous series of interviews with competitors and all six winners, which introduced a level of accessibility which I thought myself was extremely impressive. Some of the images were absolutely stunning, and in my view they showcased the sport as well as anything possibly could. They gave you a real desire to be on the water – far more than the knowledge of whether one boat was a few seconds faster than another would ever have done, and arguably (for a non-rower) more, even, than the intensity of racing.

When it comes to the times, I would go as far as to say that it seems genuinely odd that anyone other than rowing geeks like me would actually be interested, or where the idea would come from that publishing times rather than brilliant images and fantastic videos is a better way to capture a new audience. It seems to me that times are of interest to people within the sport, and of none at all to people outside it – so the accessibility argument falls away. I am clearly missing something there, and stand to be corrected in short order – but it is worth noting that in total British Rowing shared 180 pieces of content across three channels in the build up to and during the weekend, with a reach of 848,000 people. Maybe I have lower expectations than some, but – not least in the context of our having 32,000 members – that strikes me as quite a result.

My third and final point relates to the start of the tweet: “British Rowing seem intent on alienating their supporters.” Really? Do you really think that? Do people honestly and truly believe that allowing the coaching and performance team to make their own decisions about how they want to run trials, at the same time as having the comms team work around the clock to put out images and information as mentioned above, is about British Rowing being “intent on alienating” people? That we come in every day trying to find ways to annoy people? Seriously?

You know, if someone had tweeted, “Brilliant stuff from the team. Thanks a lot for all the info you’ve put out. Hopefully in future years we will get times as well, and maybe even live streaming, because lots of us in the sport would be really interested in both,” I might have quite a lot of sympathy. We are keen to find (and are actively exploring) ways to give more visibility to the top end of the sport for the members as a whole, so the comment that I was asked for would have been something on the lines of, “yup, right with you there – we’re working on solutions”.

But as it stands, not so much. The negativity of people believing that we’re “intent on alienating people”; of introducing hashtags like “StalagCaversham”; of responding to one of those 100 tweets which happened to contain a typo that mistakenly turned Newcastle into “Newscastle” with, “It is actually spelt NEWCASTLE, but you have probably never been there nor heard of it” – all these I think are deeply depressing, since you ask my view.  Maybe it’s just Twitter. But the hashtags I’d sooner be after are #PullingTogether, and #thankstotheteamforajobwelldone.