Margaret Thatcher was no sport fan

One thing she was not was an instinctive lover of sport.
“She tried occasionally to show an interest,” says her successor John Major, “and dutifully turned up to watch great sporting events, but always looked rather out of place.”

Despite, or because of, that natural antipathy, Thatcher nonetheless had a significant impact on British sport during her 11 years in power. “She never really understood sport until it migrated — and sometimes mutated — beyond the back page, or impacted on other areas of policy,” Lord Sebastian Coe has said. But migrate and mutate it did.

Here, BBC Sport looks at five areas of the sporting landscape on which Thatcher left her indelible mark.
1980 Olympics

When US president Jimmy Carter proposed that the Moscow Games be boycotted in protest against the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan, Thatcher was as quick with her support as the International Olympic Committee was with its opposition.

First to the British Olympic Association, and then its star athletes, she and her government began a concerted campaign to end any British involvement. “The Games will serve the propaganda needs of the Soviet Government,” she wrote to Sir Denis Follows, then BOA chairman. “I remain firmly convinced that it is neither in our national interest nor in the wider Western interest for Britain to take part in the Games in Moscow.

“As a sporting event, the Games cannot now satisfy the aspirations of our sportsmen and women. British attendance in Moscow can only serve to frustrate the interests of Britain.” When the BOA refused to acquiesce, the athletes were targeted. Sprinter Allan Wells was sent four packages from Thatcher’s office, their intention clear.

“One of the pictures I received from 10 Downing Street was of what looked like a dead young girl, face down, with an outstretched arm reaching for a doll,” Wells told BBC Sport last summer. “The letter had words to the effect that this is what the Soviet army are doing in Afghanistan. But I was going, and that decision was taken when I saw the letter with the picture in it.

“You’ve got to sit up when you get letters from the government and I gave it a lot of respect, but if I didn’t go it wasn’t going to make any difference to what was happening in Afghanistan.”

Wells – just like his fellow British gold medal winners that summer, Daley Thompson, Duncan Goodhew, Steve Ovett and Seb Coe – would stand on the podium with the Olympic anthem playing rather than God Save the Queen, facing the Olympic flag rather than Union Jack.

To this day, Coe is convinced he and his teammates did the right thing – not least for the impact it would have many years later on London’s hopes of staging the 2012 Games.
“Using (sport) as a weapon was both craven and self-defeating,” he has said.

“In hindsight it was a good decision to go for all sorts of reasons. I don’t think I would have been able to stand up in Singapore (in 2005) in front of the IOC and say what I said with credibility if I had boycotted in 1980.

“I was able to say that Britain had sent a team to every winter and summer games. Had I not gone in 1980 it would certainly have been seized upon and exploited by rival cities.” Thatcher, ever keen to reduce public spending, would never fall for the notion of a home Olympics as later Conservative politicians did.

When Birmingham bid for the 1992 Games, it did so without full government financial backing. The government only guaranteed losses in excess of £100m, with Birmingham City Council liable for the first portion. The city’s official letter of support was signed not by the Prime Minister but merely by Kenneth Baker, the Secretary of State for the Environment.
ID cards

The footballing landscape of the Thatcherite era was unrecognisable from today’s cosmopolitan, billion-pound Premier League product. Played in frequently dilapidated stadia, haunted by the threat of hooliganism, watched by spectators penned in behind high wire fences, it was a world Thatcher had never experienced through a fan’s eyes and seldom appeared to understand.

Lord Moynihan, Minister for Sport under Thatcher from 1987 to 1990 and chairman of the BOA during the 2012 London Olympics, on Tuesday defended the former Prime Minister’s record.  — BBC Sport.