ABSTRACT
In 1995 the government published Sport: Raising the Game, its most significant policy statement on sport since the 1975 White Paper Sport and Recreation (Department of Environment, 1975). Core to this statement was the declared intention to establish a UK Sports Institute (UKSI), (originally referred to in the document as a ‘National Academy of Sport’), a proposal which was broadly inspired by the Australian Institute of Sport (Pickup, 1996). Subsequently, a number of decision and policymaking processes could be observed, relating to decisions over the establishment of the UKSI, including the selection of priority sports; choice of partners in the process of the construction of bids by cities or consortia to host the UKSI; the selection of best bid proposal and others which are presented in detail in the first part of the results’ section below. The aim of this chapter is to outline features of these processes from a managerialist perspective and to explain how such policy proposals are implemented in what became a key battle between competing cities (or urban consortia) to attract this prestigious initiative.
