On February 25, the Commonwealth Secretariat, the intergovernmental organization that supports member countries to achieve the Commonwealth's aims of development, democracy and peace, announced the launch of a new policy tool to help member countries make informed sport decisions during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Developed in collaboration with the University of Toronto Faculty of Kinesiology and Physical Education, the online policy analysis tool offers best practices from across the Commonwealth to support policymakers in tackling emerging sport challenges in a continuously evolving health crisis. The tool is a partner piece to the discussion paper about the implications of COVID-19 for community sport and sport for development prepared by KPE researchers at the Centre for Sport Policy Studies in the summer of 2020.
“There is overwhelming evidence that the organized sport sector has been affected negatively,” says Professor Peter Donnelly, one of the co-authors of the policy tool from KPE. “While the main emphases in the media have been on the challenges faced by capitalist sport, organized sports for children and youth - in schools and communities, adult recreational leagues and all other levels of organized sport participation have suffered much more from closed facilities, staff layoffs and social distancing requirements.”
According to Donnelly, restricted access to sport and recreational physical activity has had detrimental effects on the physical, mental and community health of citizens. While many innovative ways have emerged for people to be physically active, these are far more available to higher income people than those whose exposure to poverty and unhealthy environments has already compromised their health.
“While the pandemic has exposed and exacerbated what we already understood as inequalities in health and health care, it has also exposed many other inequalities in employment, high speed broadband access, travel, transportation and so on,” he says.
However, returning to what we had before won’t be enough, according to Professor Bruce Kidd, who worked with Donnelly and Associate Professor Simon Darnell, also of KPE, on developing the policy tool.
“When we talk about ‘returning to 'normal,' we need to remember that ‘normal’ was not a very satisfactory or healthy way to live for significant proportions of the populations of Commonwealth countries,” says Kidd. “Instead we need to build back a better system.”
Kidd suspects that once herd immunity is achieved, there will not be many challenges to resuming 'normal' sporting activities - those that have been inaccessible to large proportions of the populations of Commonwealth countries. The real challenges, according to him, will be to find ways to support and fund access to sport and physical activity for far larger proportions of the population.
“There is good evidence to indicate that active healthy populations represent a real asset to public health,” he says. “People developing physical, mental and community resilience are in a far better position to manage future pandemics and future natural disasters.”
The tool suggests ways in which communities may help to support the continuation of sport and physical activity during various stages of a pandemic, and outlines some strategies that would help to achieve a more active, healthy population with more resilience in the face of future pandemics.
These strategies include:
• establishing a cap on funding for high performance sport and channeling all new funding to grassroots participation;
• encouraging school boards to revitalize curricular physical education and after-school sports and encouraging cities to continue to develop bike paths, walking/running trails and recreational spaces; and
• working to overcome inadequacies in the current sport system in order to build a much more open and inclusive system
“With the arrival of the vaccines, we are able to see the light at the end of the tunnel,” says Darnell. “We hope that our policy tool will serve as a helpful guidebook for governments not only to rebuild, but to build a better, sustainable and more inclusive sport sector that can contribute to the physical well-being and mental health of all its citizens.”