2 November 2015

UK Athletics has announced a new five year strategic partnership with Grant Thornton UK LLP, with the ambition of making UKA one of the world’s leading high performance sports organisations, as they prepare to host multiple World Championships over the coming years.

As the 2015 Rugby World Cup comes to an end, athletics is set to dominate the calendar of major global sporting events staged in the UK over the coming years, which include the London 2017 IAAF and IPC World Athletics Championships, plus the Birmingham 2018 IAAF World Indoor Championships.

London 2017 will be the first time in history that the two World Championships have been held in the same city in the same year.  Taking place in July and August 2017, more than 3,300 of the world’s best athletes from over 200 countries will compete at the iconic Olympic Stadium in the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, drawing a potential crowd of over 1.5million – allowing London to relive the glorious summer of 2012 that saw the whole of Britain revel in the success of the Olympic and Paralympic athletics at the Olympic stadium.

Announcing Grant Thornton as one of its Family of Official Partners, UKA Chief Executive Niels de Vos welcomed their commitment to helping realise UKA’s vision of “excellence in everything we do”.

“This partnership with Grant Thornton is about building dynamic teams who can create events and environments that encourage peak performance throughout the organisation.  Grant Thornton will provide quality individuals and resources that will provide additional support and critical thinking to the governing body above and beyond our usual means.”

Equally, de Vos is keen to bring in ideas from Grant Thornton that are geared towards improving performance across the UK Athletics organisation and at its events: “If British Athletics is going to be the best we can be we need to look outside our sport and get ideas from sources where perhaps other governing bodies wouldn’t look.  This is what a business would do; they look at a whole series of things and compare themselves with competitors.  Good businesses will then go way outside their sector in an effort to improve and innovate, which is what we are doing by collaborating with Grant Thornton.”

Grant Thornton will invest people and assets to help improve the culture and systems across the whole of UK Athletics, ensuring that every member of the team, from coaches and athletes to the event teams, is given the maximum opportunity to succeed.

For London 2017, Grant Thornton will assist UKA in the creation of the Organising Committee by offering strategic guidance, planning expertise and personnel to enable the world leading standard of delivery demanded by hosting an event of this scale.

Kylie Roberts, Director of Leadership Developmentat Grant Thornton, said:  "We believe that partnering with UK Athletics will help us on our journey to becoming a high-performance coaching organisation.  We have a vision to create a shared enterprise way of working and to do that our leaders need to be exceptional coaches and enablers.  We are partnering with UKA to work with us on coaching excellence and likewise we work with them to create high performing teams and a high performing organisation that can excel in a volatile, uncertain, ambiguous and complex world."