The Athletic. Hello I'm Mark Chapman, welcome to the business of sport on the athletic as ever

were joined by the athletics Matt Slater. Today's podcast is Olympic themed and with a team G.B focus will discuss the value of

chasing those gold medals from a commercial, social and political perspective.

Some good guests on this map.

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 Everett 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 GB House in Tokyo.

She'd been at to the Valadrome that day and had just seen us win some medals,

but it was a fantastic day all around ready for the for the team and I

start then 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 in 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 crops of what we do and we're in a situation where we invest in those sports and invest in events and we utilize lottery money.

So huge thank you to the everyone that plays the national lottery

because they're the people that are

can take a piece of all the success we're having.

But we're funded by both the National Lottery and the Exchequer, the public purse, and we invest that money in sports and for the Paris cycle that we're about to go into, well we're already in in some ways,

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