David Flatman column: Sport is different from business – fight discrimination through education, not annihilation

This column originally appeared in Sport magazine, a brilliant free weekly publication packed with fantastic stories. , and . And read on here to get former Bath and England rugby player David Flatman's take on a big talking point from the world of sport, this week...

During a brief period spent in a normal job at a professional rugby club, I once had to lead a series of interviews for a vacant position. An hour or so before the first applicant turned up, I was taken aside by my boss and told what I could and couldn’t ask.

“Don’t ask her age,” I was directed. “And definitely don’t mention kids, and whether or not she might want to have some. Don’t ask if she’s married, definitely don’t ask if she’s religious. Oh, and just in case she’s gay, make sure you don’t refer to her partner as male or female.”

Anyway, I cocked it up. With her having told me where she went to school - and with that being a school I knew well - I asked her when she left. My boss glared at me.

I moved on, and it went all awkward. She mentioned that she had two kids, so I asked what she might do with regards childcare, should she get the job. She replied that this was her business, and I got another glare. The thing was, however, that this had a direct impact on the hours she might be able to spend working. Yet I still couldn’t ask.

The same thing happened with a male applicant who wanted to keep his age a secret. God knows why, as we didn’t care. I asked if there was any issue with him working at weekends (when our matches were) and he told me that what he chose to do with his Sundays were his business. Okay then...

This has been the way it works in corporate human resources for a while now, and now it’s the way it works in sport. To a point, I actually like that so much potential for prejudice is removed - but I do think sport is different from business.

People in sport have to behave themselves, just as they do in business, but elite sport pushes its employees and participants to places a corporate job doesn’t. Physically it can be brutal and, when exhausted, sportspeople very often become less tolerant, less polite, less controlled. That’s just the environment.

Elite sports training can be - and generally is - violent in its toughness. Taking a few seconds to step back and consider one’s reactions isn’t as easy in this environment as in an office, purely due to a physical duress that shapes an atmosphere all its own.

Shane Sutton, the British Cycling chief who has stepped down after saying things he shouldn’t have, failed to modernise with sufficient rapidity. Nobody could argue that calling disabled athletes insulting names and allegedly telling a female rider to ‘go and have a baby’ is wrong. However, publicly aiming to have all sportspeople and sports coaches behaving as we would have a corporate chief exec behave is unrealistic, in my view.

I hate discriminatory behaviour, but I do think that educating coaches like Sutton is more likely to help both the individual and the sport. After all, this is just who he is. So I say let’s not annihilate, let’s educate.