With the turn of the year, athletes, commentators and millions of sports fans in Britain have begun to look forward ever more eagerly to the London Olympic Games.
Meanwhile, a small sporting tragedy, and another blow to women athletes in Britain, is about to take place in British softball without much public knowledge or recognition.
By January 27, the Great Britain Women's Fastpitch Softball Team, currently among the top three teams in Europe and ranked 11th in the world, will have to declare whether it will take up the place it achieved through qualification at the 2012 Women's World Championships, to be held in Whitehorse, Canada from July 13-22.
And with the deadline looming, it's looking like the team -- many of whose members are students -- won't be able to afford to go and will have to give up its place.
Olympic history
Most people in the UK have forgotten -- if they ever knew -- that women's fastpitch softball was an Olympic medal sport from the 1996 Games in Atlanta through 2008 in Beijing. The decision to drop softball and baseball from the 2012 Games was particularly cruel to those sports in Britain, for whom a host country place in London could have transformed funding and public profile.
Although a serious national team programme in women's fastpitch softball only began in 1999, the GB team moved steadily up the European rankings over the next few years and in 2004, UK Sport decided that the team had demonstrated the potential for Olympic qualification. However, shortly after the agency awarded softball £528,000 for the 2005-2008 Olympic cycle, the sport was dropped from the programme for London 2012. And when the GB Team failed to qualify for the single place available to Europe at the Beijing Olympics, all UK Sport's money was withdrawn in 2007.
Despite that, the programme has gone from strength to strength, with players and staff paying most of the costs. In 2009, the team achieved a best-ever second place finish at the European Championships and qualified for the first time by right for the 2010 World Championships in Venezuela.
Fighting for funds
The money that got the team to Venezuela, along with player contributions, came through winning free flights in a British Airways contest plus significant donations from a British businessman based in Coventry and an American multi-millionaire based in Detroit, both of whom had personal connections with team members.
At the 2010 World Championships in Venezuela, the GB team finished as the 11th best team in the world -- an amazing achievement for a country where the sport and the player pool are very small and the programme has no public funding, in contrast to most of our competitors.
In 2011, with money left over from those 2010 donations, the GB Team played very competitively against the top four teams in the world at the annual World Cup of Softball in the United States, then qualified for the 2012 World Championships by finishing in the top three at European Championships in Italy.
But now the money has run out, and the sources that provided it in 2010 are no longer available. The cost of preparing for and competing at the 2012 World Championships, even on a shoestring, is estimated at over £40,000, well beyond what the players and volunteer coaches can afford. Predictably, all attempts to find commercial sponsorship for a women's minority sport with little public profile have come to nought in the current economic climate.
And UK Sport, with its "No Compromise" focus on funding for sports that can win Olympic medals, is unable to help, despite an acknowledgement by Chief Executive Liz Nicholl that GB Softball has achieved more than many sports receiving Olympic funding.
Bob Fromer, who has overseen the GB Women's Softball Team programme as General Manager since 2000, says, "A wonderful and dedicated group of players has made GB into one of the world's elite softball programmes over the past few years, against all the odds. These players, many of whom will retire after this summer, deserve to play one more time on the World Championship stage. Sadly, it's beginning to look like they may not get the chance."
Hoping for a miracle
The GB Women's Softball Team has been reduced to hoping for some kind of miracle to occur -- or a philanthropist to come forward -- over the next few weeks. Otherwise, the players' World Championship dreams will be over and the programme, with no prospect of future funding except in the unlikely event that softball regains an Olympic place, will struggle to reach such heights again.
Anyone interested in being part of that miracle can email GB Softball General Manager .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) or call him on 01886-884204.