Making the Most of SportAccord 2024 in Birmingham
by Dame Katherine Grainger , Chair, UK Sport
This week, many of the top leaders of the global sporting world are meeting in Birmingham for the SportAccord World Sport and Business Summit.
This annual event is one of the flagship moments in the global sporting calendar where representatives from the International Olympic Committee – IOC , International Sport Federations, National Governing Bodies, global cities and countries, come together to make connections, share challenges, discuss solutions, and make decisions about the future of international sport.
It is a real privilege for the UK to host this event, for the first time since 2011, and an honour to welcome leaders from across the world of sport to the West Midlands. It is also incredibly fitting that SportAccord is being hosted here in Birmingham. A city with such a rich sporting heritage and a history of delivering world class sporting events including the memorable Birmingham 2022 Commonwealth Games .
Birmingham, and the West Midlands region, are, of course, just one of the diverse and incredibly experienced cities and regions in the UK who have a proven track record of hosting the world’s biggest and most impactful sporting events. The partnership of cities and regions, working closely with our national and devolved governments and with our domestic sporting federations, is one of the UK’s best-selling points when it comes to hosting major sporting events. I am so pleased that many of the locations are represented in Birmingham this week so that we can demonstrate the strength of that partnership to the sporting world.
This week represents a fantastic opportunity for us in the UK’s sporting community to engage with and learn from our colleagues around the world. In my opening remarks at this morning’s session at the conference, I mentioned my firm view that many of the challenges and opportunities we face are the same, wherever in the world we’re facing them, from the rise of technology, to engaging new audiences, or from the drive for gender equality, to advancing environmental sustainability and many more. I am firmly of the view (perhaps shaped by my time as an athlete) that we can better meet these challenges and make the most of the opportunities available if we work together, learn from each other, and drive towards some common goals.
With the above in mind, I am really looking forward to hosting, in partnership with our West Midlands and UK Government ( Department for Culture, Media and Sport ) colleagues, many of our UK national governing body and international federation partners at our UK Sport reception. This will be a unique chance to develop those personal relationships, which are so important in international sport, to learn how others around the world are responding to the mutual challenges we are facing and to lay the ground for collaboration in the future.
The hosting of SportAccord here in the UK is also an opportunity for the UK sporting system to share our future ambitions with influential colleagues from around the world. When it comes to major sporting events this means being proud of our record as a reliable, trusted, and experienced host and relaying the fact that no country buys more tickets per head of their population than the UK when we host events.
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It also means sharing with international colleagues our ambitious, forward-thinking strategic framework for hosting major sporting events which was published last month, and which places an emphasis on events that resonate and reach into communities in different parts of the UK; broadening access to the extraordinary sporting moments those events provide. This week we will be discussing with international federations how we can work in partnership to pioneer new events concepts which appeal to new audiences, with a particular focus on para and urban sports.
Whilst in Birmingham, our team will also be engaging with global partners to discuss how we can work side by side with them to achieve a safe, fair, and thriving international sporting system.
We want to ensure the UK, as one of the world’s leading sporting nations, plays its part in building effective international sport governance, supporting ethical leadership, promoting gender equality, championing environmental sustainability, and ensuring the highest standards of athlete welfare. We know that no one can, or should, do this alone and so this week is all about forming international partnerships which enable progress to be made in each of these areas.
I, for one, am incredibly proud that the UK (and the great city of Birmingham) is hosting SportAccord this week and we at UK Sport are committed to making the most of the opportunity it presents to engage, to learn and to share our plans for the future with the international sporting world.
I hope to see many of you in Birmingham before the week is out!
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