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The Beijing Olympics achieved huge worldwide audiences, but how can Wales take advantage of the sporting events coming in the next decade?

IT’S 2010, and the vaunted Golden Decade of British Sport dawns. With it comes immense opportunities for Welsh sport, as advances in technology have transform and globalized the way it can be watched and appreciated. During the next 10 years, a slew of major international sporting events will be held across the United Kingdom, and Wales should benefit from some of these. The new decade opens with the staging of the Ryder Cup at the Celtic Manor Course, an event that offers Wales numerous opportunities to sell itself.

From an analysis of the Noughties, and the last 12 months in particular, there is substantial evidence to suggest that Wales has effectively launched itself on the international stage as a nation capable of hosting major sporting events. As well as the success of the Millennium Stadium as a facility able to offer a venue for sports ranging from rugby to speedway and equestrianism, Wales has produced its share of outstanding performers and performances at individual and team sports in international competition. Furthermore, sportspersons such as Ryan Giggs, Nicole Cooke, Shane Williams and Dame Tanni Grey Thompson have become role models for the next generation of sporting competitors.

For small states and stateless nations such as Wales, sport has long provided an avenue for building self-esteem and boosting external recognition, while serving as a critical source of collective identification. Sport has been central to inventing, maintaining and projecting the idea of a single Welsh identity in and outside its blurred borders. It has helped gloss over the different meanings that the people of Wales attach to their nationality, enabling them to assert their Welshness in the face of internal division and the all-encompassing shadow of England. With players and spectators united in song, colour, and game, sport provides an ideal vehicle, as Martin Johnes asserts, to express a singular unified nation. Although some persist in arguing that Wales has been less dependent on sport in expressing its identity since 1999, as it now possesses a set of new political institutions, this perspective fails to recognize the vital role sport can and does play in contemporary society in facilitating economic regeneration, promoting social coherence, countering discrimination and fostering a sense of responsibility and team ethic.

Since the 1998 Government of Wales Act, the process of redefining Welsh identity has speeded up. This has occurred within the dual context of the continuing accommodation of the notion of ‘Otherness’ defining Wales and the Welsh and also England and the English. During the past decade this has transpired at the same time as the burgeoning neo-liberal government agenda of New Labour. However, the reality of sport in Wales is yet more complex because of the desire in some sports to happily accept Wales’s Britishness.

The limitations of the devolution settlement, coupled with the lack of a burning desire for Wales to extricate itself from the continuing existence of the UK sporting umbrella and the Olympic movement, implies there is no major objection to being wrapped within the Union flag. Wales and Welsh individuals are content, in the most part, to reconcile themselves with Wales’s Britishness. Welsh cricket has benefited from integration with, rather than separateness from England – hence the support for the England cricket team throughout the successful 2005 and 2009 Ashes campaigns – while selection for the British and Irish Lions remains the pinnacle of achievement for many Welsh rugby union players.

So what are the challenges? The most immediate are to maximise the opportunities presented by events in 2010 – the Ryder Cup, the continuing development of the SWALEC Stadium and the Delhi Commonwealth Games. These opportunities should be consolidated throughout the Golden Decade when Wales can enjoy some positive spin-off from the 2012 Olympics, the 2014 Edinburgh Commonwealth Games and the Rugby League and Rugby Union World Cup competitions.

Welsh politicians, in conjunction with sports administrators and the business community, need to think immediately about the commercial gains to be made from sports other than rugby and how these can be linked into developments such as tourism, retailing, heritage and entertainment. In generating economic strength using sport as a catalyst, the Welsh Assembly Government is linked into what Peter Stead refers to as a “Performance Culture” in which energy is channelled via enterprise and excellence through sport as well as the arts. This generates positive publicity and external recognition.

The hosting of the Ryder Cup provides Wales with the most high profile sporting event in media terms after the Summer Olympics and the FIFA World Cup. Although most media attention is currently being focused on issues of team selection and the adequacies of existing transport infrastructure, one hopes that there is a full realisation of how Wales can utilize the three days of actual competition and the build up to the event in such a way as to market the brand image of Wales. This event, as the Wales Tourism Alliance correctly maintains, will have far more national and local consequence to Wales than the 2012 Olympics.

Following the successful staging of the first home cricket test by England on non- English soil at the SWALEC stadium in July 2009, Glamorgan have been advertising the 2010 One Day International between England and Australia since the end of October. This represents the start of the next stage of consolidation and development of the stadium as a recognized international venue. Yet Glamorgan need to ensure that future fixtures have a truly distinctive Welsh flavour in so far as the governing body of England and Wales Cricket permits. Last July, the stadium lacked a truly Welsh feel once the opening ceremony passed. Although events will continue to raise revenue for Glamorgan and the City of Cardiff, it is essential that stronger Welsh elements are built into the promotion of future matches in order to make the cricket supporters’ visit to Wales truly different. Maybe the EWCB can be cajoled into permitting England players to have a dragon or daffodil strategically placed on their kit.

The 2010 Commonwealth Games in New Delhi provides the only multi-sport event in which Wales can compete as a nation. Although the event does not receive the national media attention it merits, in Wales much has been made of the fact that in the 2006 Games Wales secured more medals per head of population than any of the other Home Countries. Again an opportunity beckons for capitalising on sporting prowess: however, the Games unfortunately start very soon after the Ryder Cup and may lose some of the attention that they deserve.

While the achievements of such sportspersons as Joe Calzaghe, Geraint Thomas, Tom James, Becky Brewerton. Michela Breeze and Rhys Williams must not be underestimated, the next decade for Welsh sport should ideally combine three elements which demand strategic leadership. The aims should be to equal the feats of the Beijing Summer and Para-Olympics, to foster a greater desire to participate in sport encouraged by cross-departmental co-operation within the Welsh Assembly Government and to generate a wider global recognition of Wales as a nation worth visiting beyond its capital city.