Callum Skinner: 'Younger athletes have been exploited and no-one has benefitted more than management'

Callum Skinner, the Olympic gold medal-winning cyclist, has called for a complete overhaul of Britain’s elite sporting system following fresh allegations this week of athlete bullying and a separate legal threat from leading athletes over Team GB's sponsorship rules.

Writing in The Sunday Telegraph, Skinner says that the row over 'Rule 40' - guidelines which restrict athletes’ personal sponsors during the Olympics - is symptomatic of serious wider flaws in a system that exploits young athletes.

He is now backing Jess Varnish’s call for athletes to have employee status, a relaxation on 'Rule 40' that would allow athletes to increase sponsorship opportunities during the Olympics, greater diversity within management and new athlete contracts which do far more to protect against bullying and discrimination.

“The system has lost its way and fault lies at the top,” writes Skinner. “The system worked well when UK Olympic athletes first began turning full-time. Athletes were older, often university or trade-educated, and were paid and treated as equals. Athletes are now younger, turning full-time at 17, and sometimes that youth has brought naivety. This is a demographic that has been exploited. Through some of the most successful times British Sport has ever witnessed, no-one has benefitted more than management. It’s high time for change.”

Skinner, who is Lead Athlete for the organisation Global Athlete, is himself only 27 but has chosen to step away from competing in elite sport and is adamant that change will also have a lasting performance benefit.

Issues of athlete welfare have again been in sharp focus this week. A series of British women athletes have made allegations to The Telegraph of bullying, “fat shaming” and an “old-boys network” of “arrogant and egotistical” male coaches in British elite sport. The ongoing medical tribunal into Dr Richard Freeman, the former British Cycling doctor, has also heard extraordinary allegations of bullying inside the organisation.