How the World Student Games of 1991 ended up a legacy of failure for Sheffield - David Behrens

It had been lumbered with paying £25m a year to clear a bill which with remortgaging had reached a thumping £658m. The instalments outlasted some of the facilities that were built for the games and which were supposed to be their legacy.

Chief among these was Don Valley Stadium, which was twice the size of Crystal Palace but fell out of favour because athletes said it was too windy. It was bulldozed 11 years ago.

On the other hand the games gave us Sheffield Arena, the first such venue in Yorkshire, long before Leeds had one, and it’s still thriving.

But though the event became a money pit deeper than any of the actual pits under Sheffield, there was a time when its organisers were spending cash faster than the Bank of England could print it. I know because I helped them do it.

It was two years before the games began and long before a brick had been laid on any of the new facilities that I was handed the contract to produce a promotional film that might attract potential sponsors.

It was a hard sell because almost no-one had heard of the World Student Games. It had no big-name competitors and its audience was mainly in eastern Europe. As far as TV networks and corporate funders were concerned it was just a giant school sports day.

A little due diligence would have alerted the council to this before they agreed to get involved. The warning signs were already there: no other country was bidding and there was none of the government funding that previous hosts in the east had enjoyed. So an enterprise that had been conceived as a once-in-a-lifetime shot at regeneration and a showcase to the nation became a triumph of hope over experience.

The film had come my way because I was a producer at Yorkshire Television, which the organisers hoped would broadcast the games to the nation. We pitched them the most elaborate production we could conceive, with the Prime Minister, the Vice President of the USA and assorted international sports stars banging on about “the true spirit of sport” and the unique merits of Sheffield. I wrote and filmed an endorsement from Margaret Thatcher which she read off an autocue inside 10 Downing Street.

But even with a filming trip to Washington thrown in, it wasn’t going to cost anything like the £200,000 they had budgeted. It was twice the going rate at the time but I doubt they knew it.

It soon became clear that the same was true of all the other budgets – and by June 1990 the council’s organising company had been shut down with debts of £3m.

Sheffield was also waking up to the realisation that it might have gone to all this trouble without the rest of the country even noticing, for there was still no TV deal on the table. The BBC wasn’t interested and ITV had just screened Twenty Years Hard Labour, a presciently-titled World In Action documentary deeply critical of the whole project.

The one company prepared to act as host broadcaster – and only then at a cut-down rate – was the newly-launched BSkyB, whose coverage was restricted to the few homes with satellite dishes. In the end YTV helped save the day with a cash contribution of £105,000 for regional broadcasting rights. This, ironically, made it one of the games’ biggest sponsors rather than a seeker of sponsorship from others. But it didn’t do much to raise Sheffield’s profile outside Yorkshire; ITV in London screened only two late evening programmes.

So it was a damp squib. With no clear path to profit, Sheffield’s grand vision had come crashing down to earth. It had aimed for the stars but failed to take the lens cap off the telescope. Few lessons were learned; nine years later the Blair government performed a similar egg-on-face manoeuvre when it tried to put on a show for the world in the Millennium Dome.

The final insult to Sheffield came in 2002 when it lost out humiliatingly to Manchester as host of the Commonwealth Games.

When the dust finally settled at City Hall there was a feeling of betrayal. The games had laid bare the government’s hostility towards Sheffield, said the council leader Mike Bower as he recalled bitterly Mrs Thatcher’s hollow endorsement.

He didn’t know the half of it. All she’d really done was read aloud the words I’d scribbled on the autocue.