The Athletic.

Hello, I'm Mark Chapman. Welcome to the business of sport on The Athletic.

As ever, we're joined by the Athletics, Matt Slater.

Today's podcast is Olympic-themed and with a team GB focus.

We'll discuss the value of chasing those gold medals from a commercial, social and political

perspective.

Some good guests on this, Matt.

Yeah, that's right, Chappas.

We've got Sport England's director of sport, Phil Smith, and we've got British Cycling

Director Danny Avery, and we'll be talking about funding, the link between medals and participation,

how sports make those investment decisions, the value of the sports sector, bidding for major

events, working, and also working under the huge shadow of football casts. Okay, so Phil Smith and Danny

Every on the way, but first an interview you did earlier this week. Yes, on Tuesday I spoke to

UK sports CEO, Sally Monday on a Zoom call from Team G.B House in Tokyo. She'd been at to the

Valedrome that day and had just seen us win some medals, but it was a fantastic day all around really for the team.

And I started asking her by the question that I'm sure many of our listeners who don't follow Olympic sports will be thinking right now.

What is UK sports and how do they make those key decisions?

The Olympic Games and the Paralympic Games is very much the centre of UK sports world.

We exist to support Olympic and Paralympic sport to be successful.

And we also exist to support major events and bringing major and mega events to the UK shores.

And that's the sort of crux of what we do.

And we're in a situation where we invest in those sports and invest in events and we utilize a lottery money. So huge thank you to

...