Sarah Storey has accused cycling chiefs of failing to properly promote disabled athletes after the Paralympic great was rated 100-1 by bookmakers to win the Sports Personality of the Year award.
Storey, 47, has been nominated for the BBC’s top sports award after breaking her own British record by winning her 18th and 19th Paralympic gold medals in September. She went on to land her 28th and 29th world titles, making her the most decorated contender on this year’s shortlist.
The nomination was her fourth after she finished in last place after London 2012, second-last following Rio 2016 and missed out on the top three post-Tokyo 2020.
After discovering she had been installed as a rank outsider despite setting records that may never be broken, she hit out at the funding and television coverage of disability sport, complaining the latter “disappears for the four years in between” the Paralympic Games and proclaiming “very little” had improved in para-cycling since the International Cycling Union (UCI) took charge of it almost two decades ago.
“I won four gold medals in 24 days in September 2024 and this is the fourth time I’ve been on the list,” she said. “So maybe someone with a crystal ball will tell me whether all those ‘fours’ means it’s a good thing.
“I think we don’t get enough coverage between Games. Para-sport disappears for the four years in between. There isn’t sufficient funding and support for any of the para-athletes – maybe except tennis – for athletes to be professional athletes. So, the vast majority of para-athletes will have a job of some kind, will be doing some work alongside.”
Highlighting her own roles as Greater Manchester’s Active Travel Commissioner, and with the Manchester Metropolitan University Institute of Sport and Lancashire Cricket Club, she added: “We have to train like we’re full-time, we have to deliver the performances as though we’re full-time. But we don’t get the coverage to bring the finance into the sport that we need to deliver that professional level. And it’s really, really challenging.”
Storey’s nomination came days after she fractured her ankle while training for the ITV show Dancing on Ice and was forced to withdraw from the prime-time programme.
“You only have to look at comments when I was found to be out of Dancing on Ice,” she said. “People were like, ‘Well, who is she? Hopefully, she’s replaced with someone who’s more well-known’. And that just says a lot, doesn’t it? People don’t see para sport on the TV enough to know who their most successful athlete is.”
Asked what she would do to change that, she replied: “I would make sure that we utilise some of the coffers that are in there, in the international governing bodies, to start to speculate to accumulate on the coverage front. We need to see the event at the highest level – World Championships, World Cup events – on the TV. We need to see that streamed with proper coverage.
Importance of integrated events
“At the moment, you have to work really hard to find out who’s done what. And even when I’m following my own sport and I know where to look for it, it’s not well laid out, it’s not well done. So, when you look at the way the UCI do things, the only reason we got coverage at the World Championships in Zurich was because we happened to be part of the event where the able-bodied riders were. If we were stand-alone, like it will be next year in Belgium, I can almost guarantee the coverage will be nothing like what we experienced in Zurich.
“The UCI have had hold of para-cycling since 2006-2007. So, in almost 20 years, very little has improved.
“Those integrated events are really important. And I think once we’ve got coverage, once we’ve got a narrative in between the Paralympic Games, we start to see those personalities coming out.
“Many people have, more than once, assumed that I’ve retired. And they were very surprised and pleased to see that I was selected again for another Games. So, I think it’s really important that people don’t make that assumption just because they haven’t seen you race on TV.”
