Cyclists are true sport champions

Sep 12 2008 by Nicholas Craig, The Journal

FOOTBALL, which eats up millions of pounds, is this week sharing the spotlight in the North East with cycling, financially starved for decades.

The Tour of Britain reaches our region today, bringing hundreds of top cyclists, including Olympic winners, to Darlington, County Durham, Northumberland and NewcastleGateshead. It will be a fantastic sight, all the better at first hand.

Cycling as a top-level sport is a far different animal to the pleasant, pedal-pushing we define as exercise. It is thrilling, dangerous and exhilarating. The bikes are engineering miracles and the cyclists’ stamina is superhuman.

As stage six of the Tour of Britain wheels through Corbridge, I hope to have the chance to cheer them on. The tour of the region will delight our tourist chiefs, as it takes in picturesque towns from Sedgefield through Stamfordham to Seaton Sluice. It also visits Morpeth, recently submerged county town of Northumberland, but by today hopefully recovered from destructive downpours.

I recall the Tour of Britain in its previous incarnation as the Milk Race. Then, as now, it struggled to achieve media coverage or wide appeal. How unlike football that is, the constant fodder of tabloid sales and sensationalist speculation.

The power of football to affect every sector of life amazes me. In London and the South East last week the mismanagement of Newcastle United was the main topic of conversation.

The bizarre, surreal management mess at NUFC even appears to be metamorphosing into an easy, lazy evaluation of Newcastle’s ability to manage itself in the eyes of a few tunnel-visioned businesspeople I spoke to.

This is all the more ironic as the club’s key decisions seem to have been taken in the city of London, not Newcastle.

The sooner the situation is resolved the better, for our football and our business prospects. As the cyclists on stage six will discover, we have a spectacular region which has attracted and kept many talented business leaders.

We need further investment and better retention of talent, and for that, the values of the Olympic winning cyclists are key to our business growth.

Their determination, fitness and focus on success are a country mile away from the fatally flawed strategy pursued by those failing to manage at St James’s Park.

Nicholas Craig is a partner at Watson Burton law firm