Sport Is Held on Trust

No one owns a sport. Administrators, board members, promoters and advocates are all temporary custodians of something that existed before them and will outlast them. This is not sentimentality; it is the most practical way to understand leadership in sport. The custodian's question is never merely how do we succeed this season, but in what condition will we hand this on?

That question shaped the five years I spent campaigning to overturn a rule that had excluded boxers with Type 1 diabetes from professional licensing in the UK for nearly ninety years. The campaign succeeded — the first licence was granted, and a pathway now exists that did not exist before. But the deeper motivation was always custodial: the conviction that those of us with influence in sport are obliged to repair what we find broken, not simply to manage around it.

The Inheritance Includes the Flaws

When leaders inherit a sport, they inherit all of it: the traditions worth protecting and the injustices embedded so deeply they have become invisible. The boxing rule we challenged was precisely such an inheritance. Written in an era when Type 1 diabetes was poorly understood, it had been passed down through generations of administrators, none of whom had created it and few of whom had ever examined it.

This is how outdated rules survive: not through malice, but through the quiet assumption that inherited things must have their reasons. Leadership means refusing that assumption. It means auditing the inheritance — asking which rules still serve the athletes and which merely serve the filing cabinet.

The audit is uncomfortable because it implicates no one and everyone at once. No current administrator wrote the flawed rule, so no one feels responsible for it; yet everyone with authority has the power to question it, so everyone shares responsibility for its survival. Custodianship resolves that paradox simply: you are answerable for what you inherit the moment you have the power to change it.

Repair Is Harder Than Maintenance

Let me be honest about the cost. Leaving sport better than you found it is far harder than leaving it as it was. Maintenance is applauded; repair is resisted. Our campaign required five years of medical evidence, institutional engagement and patience through repeated setbacks. There were no guarantees, and for long stretches, no visible progress.

But this is exactly why the responsibility falls to leaders. Ordinary participants in a sport lack the access, credibility and staying power that repair demands. Those of us who have those assets — through position, experience or networks built across business and advisory careers — hold them, in part, on behalf of those who do not. Influence unused for repair is influence wasted.

Better Means Fairer, Not Just Bigger

Sport often measures improvement in revenue, audiences and facilities. Those matter, but they are not the custodian's primary metric. A sport can grow richer while becoming less fair, more popular while quietly excluding people who deserve a place in it. The truest measure of better is the answer to a single question: can more people of merit now participate fully than could before?

By that measure, the licence decision improved boxing in a way no broadcast deal ever could. A category of athlete that had been excluded by default for almost a century can now be assessed on evidence and given a fair hearing. The sport's talent pool widened. Its integrity deepened. Its promise — that discipline and ability are what count — became more true.

Building Things That Outlast You

The final obligation of stewardship is durability. It is not enough to fix a problem in a way that depends on your continued presence; the fix must be institutional, embedded in frameworks that operate long after you have moved on. That is why our campaign never sought an exception for one athlete, but a change in approach: a standing, evidence-based assessment process that will serve applicants for decades.

This principle guides everything I now do in advisory and governance work: build the mechanism, not the moment. Legacies that require their author's supervision are not legacies at all.

The Standard We Should All Accept

Leave sport better than you found it. It is a simple standard, and a demanding one. It asks leaders to spend their influence on repairs that may not be completed during their tenure and may never carry their name. But it is the only standard worthy of the trust that sport represents — the trust of every young athlete who believes effort will be judged fairly.

I was fortunate to see one such repair completed. There are more waiting, in every sport, for leaders willing to accept the custodian's burden. Updates on this continuing work appear on the news page, and I welcome conversations with fellow custodians through my contact page.