| GB BASEBALL TEAM FORCED TO WITHDRAW FROM SECONDARY OLYMPIC QUALIFIER |
The Great Britain Baseball Team has been forced to withdraw from a Secondary Olympic Qualifying Tournament scheduled for March 7-14 in Chinese Taipei due to a lack of funds.
The GB Team earned the right to participate in this eight-team event, which will determine the final three places for the Olympic Baseball competition in Beijing, by finishing second in the European Championships last September. Spain, which finished in third place, will also compete in the Secondary Qualifier. But GB’s place will now go to the fourth place finisher, Germany.
The GB Team management has been trying for the past few months to find the £40,000 that it would cost to take the team to the Qualifier, and has been supported in this effort by the BOA and some sections of the British media. But UK Sport, which stopped funding the GB Baseball programme in 2005, refused to help and a BOA request for a further Olympic Solidarity grant from the International Olympic Committee (it was mostly Olympic Solidarity money that allowed the team to compete in the European Championships) was also declined.
For a brief while, there appeared to be some possibility that the International Baseball Federation (IBAF) could provide the bulk of the money necessary for GB to travel to the Qualifier. But the IBAF, in the end, was unable to provide a large enough sum.
Although the GB Team will now miss out on a final chance to compete on the Olympic stage in what could be baseball’s last appearance in the Games, there are still exciting prospects ahead. GB has qualified to play in the 2009 IBAF World Championships, where funding to cover much of the cost should be available from the IBAF; and there is still a chance that Britain could be invited to play in the 2009 World Baseball Classic, where the costs would largely be covered by MLB.
But looking further ahead – for example to the next European Championships in 2010, when baseball will not be an active Olympic sport – the GB Baseball programme is likely to have no external funding at all and will have to be structured and operated on a very different basis from the programme that has moved over the past few years from flirting with relegation to the B Pool to second in Europe and on the fringe of becoming one of the top dozen national teams in the world.
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