At the heart of the story of Cinderella is status. Princes are supposed to marry princesses, not maids – people like us do things like this.
The story begins when the well-worn path takes a turn. That’s the power of a great story. Curious, we pay attention, we listen.
If you could look for future sports stars in unlikely places, where would you look?
The prevailing performance pathway narrative is this: more players, more medals. The wider the playing base, the more talented players we will produce. More lottery tickets, better odds.
But we run out of money long before we can say with certainty that we will win. Only one Sports National Governing Body in Wales receives more than one million pounds in funding from Sport Wales; most receive significantly less.
Human performance—the game we play—isn’t rigged. It doesn’t work like a casino game with known probabilities. There are plenty of things we know for sure work; predicting who is going to win medals is not one of them.
If you had £20 million to spend on sport and physical activity in Wales, what would you spend it on? More programs, more pathways, more of what we already have? Or removing the barriers that keep people from being healthy, active, and in tune with nature?
What would you do? I’d love to know.