The light of the world

The Beyond Sport Summit, London July 2012

I’ve been skateboarding since I was six, growing up in Australia. Now we’ve brought it to Afghanistan with, “Skatestan”. We teach kids to board, to do something fun and make something of their lives.

I am at the Beyond Sport Summit in London, an annual jamboree of energy and creativity that showcases organisations the world over that are using sport in some capacity, most often unusual and unanticipated, to promote positive pursuits for people from Thailand to Timbuktu.

In the first day I’ve met someone using surfing to promote HIV prevention in Khayelitsha, Cape Town’s largest—and allegedly most violent—informal settlement; a member of the Georgian national rugby team who is running an outreach programme for youth offenders in his country’s prison system, and a woman from California managing Girls Kickin’ It, a football programme for the victims of sexual violence in the territory of Joseph Kony’s Lords Resistance Army in northern Uganda. There are organisations here that run sports programmes in deprived inner city areas of the UK, outreach programmes from famous sport teams including the New Orleans Saints and Real Madrid, a black former NFL player who is vice principle and director of athletics at a school in Arizona; and a Venezuelan industrialist who, after his factories were targeted and robbed by criminal gangs, made contact with the same people and brought them into a partnership that employs them at his business but makes them go to school and participate in a local rugby league, saying that the physical discipline of the sport was the only thing he could find to get gang members to cooperate with each other. One of the more colourful figures here—literally—is “KK”, a heavily tattooed ex LA gang member who was deported from the US to Cambodia, the country of his birth which he had left in diapers and knew nothing about, but set to something he did know about—break dancing, a pursuit he’s since introduced to the streets of Phnom Penh.

The days proceed like this, each project seemingly more interesting and unusual than the last—a vast cacophony of activity. There is also gathered here a corps of film makers, journalists, aid workers, school sports teams, representatives of sporting bodies and government agencies plus top drawer corporate sponsorship bucking up with real money to sponsor this enormous event that houses 800 delegates packed into daily seminars and panel discussions. The latter are manned by celebs lending their celebrity to this event, a group as diverse as David Beckham and Tony Blair, Jamie Oliver and Muhammad Ali. The later is, easily, the star of the show and when he is wheeled on stage, infirm and in the advanced stages of Parkinson’s, but alert and engaged and lifting an arm in greeting, the sense of awe which settles on the room is palpable, before leading to a standing ovation as moving as anything this writer has experienced.

I am here in my own unlikely capacity to represent a boxing club for child soldiers, The Kivu Reintegration Centre, and will admit to pride that these brave young men are easily as inspiring as anything else represented here, as well as bemusement that it has fallen to me to guide this project to where ever it needs to go. For that there is no better place to be than here, telling our story and beating the bushes for funding in what is the equivalent of speed dating for development projects. By day two I’ve been handed forms to fill out by aid agencies and told to wait till next year, received an offer from the owner of a Nascar racetrack in Pennsylvania—in return for a branding arrangement I would unlikely have a great deal of control over—and had the brush-off from other organisations uninterested or unable to help. I have not found love.

It is late morning when Mohammed Ali’s highly articulate wife and business manager Lonnie Ali is wrapping up her participation in a panel discussion with Tony Blair and is heading into the well guarded VIP holding area. I know what I have to do. Intercepting the presenter who is about to disappear back stage I thrust my card in his hand, quickly tell him who we are and what we do, that we don’t have a cent of funding from anyone yet and ask if he will give my card to Lonnie Ali and request a meeting. I say this as quickly and clearly as I can. A lot is riding on this encounter that feels much the same as for a door-to-door salesman in the 30 second slot before the home owner decides to invite them in or slam the door. The presenter, Chris Grant, a famous figure in this country and a giant of a man with an engaging manner, looks me straight in the eye, says that we have a remarkable project and that he will give my message to the Ali people. Fifteen minutes later an American woman emerges from the holding area, approaches and says that she will set up a Skype meeting with the Alis in the next few weeks before leaving me with one piece of advice:

Just remember, they are very normal people.

This is the sweetest thing I’ve ever heard.