Scientists are a tolerant lot

Scientists are a tolerant lot. Over the years they have been told so often that “the money just isn’t there” that some have even come to accept it. That may be changing, as the amounts heading towards financial institutions render the word “million” somewhat passé.

And there’s another area where sums are calculated in billions – the cost of staging the next Olympics in London.

Still, you might think, some of the £10 billion (or so…who’s counting?) the London Olympics will cost must be going towards sports science. After all, when medals can be decided by a hundredth of a second, science might just provide that extra little bit that makes the difference between silver and gold.

Which makes it all the more surprising that the proportion of the cost of the London Olympics that’s going into sports science can’t even be counted in hundredths of the total budget. Over four years, it’s not even a thousandth.

Scott Drawer, Director of Research and Innovation at UK Sport, has £1.5 million a year to fund R&D and innovation, spread across all aspects of performance over the entire gamut of Olympic disciplines (summer and winter) – covering areas such as aerodynamics, air pollution, stress, materials, coaching technologies, psychology and training tools, including remote sensing and diagnostics.

Surprisingly, given the lavish branding that surrounds all sport, there’s nothing coming in from industrial collaborations or grants. Every penny of Drawer’s budget comes from the UK Treasury and the National Lottery.

Speaking this month to the R&D Society in London, Drawer explained that – as all research administrators must – he has to prioritise, so many sports get fairly short shrift. Admittedly, prioritisation does yield results: witness the string of medals earned by Team GB in the Beijing Games in cycling and rowing, even if it earned the jibe from the Australians that the UK only wins medals when sitting down, preferably going backwards.

Even tougher for Drawer, part of his brief is innovation, understood not simply as novelty, but the development of new products – as technology transfer. The mechanisms are in place, with arrangements with Ploughshare Innovations, which manages tech transfer on behalf of the UK Defence Science and Technology Laboratory. But as Drawer said, nothing has yet been patented; in fact, no patents have yet been applied for.

As any scientist or technology manager can tell you, it takes more than political correctness to get innovation going. It also takes investment in R&D: you have to have something to transfer. And at the rate investment in UK performance in its own Olympics is going, there won’t be anything to transfer in 2012 when the crowds have gone and the stadium is downsized.

As for the other must-do with research funding these days, international collaboration, it doesn’t seem to be working, at least, not when it comes to specific projects. Drawer’s experience is that if he wants help solving a problem, his first port of call has to be a UK science department. In this area, old-fashioned nationalism seems to be a key driver of commitment.

Drawer’s talk at the R&D Society was entitled “Winning margins in performance sport: how crucial is R&D”. The answer seemed unequivocal: yes, it does. But the money is not following the need. At this rate, there’s not going to be much, if anything, in terms of a sports science legacy from the London Olympics.