Niels de Vos

Niels Ernest de Vos (born 27 March 1967)[1] is a British sports businessman and chief executive.

Early life

He was born in Walsall. He attended King Edward's School, Birmingham. He studied Modern History from 1986-89 at Keble College, Oxford.

Career

De Vos came to prominence as the Chief Executive of Sale Sharks, a professional rugby union club.[2] De Vos helped the club move to a larger stadium in 2003, leaving Heywood Road in favour of Edgeley Park. In January 2007 he became the Chief Executive of the sporting governing body UK Athletics, headquartered in Birmingham.[3] De Vos modernised the athletics body, cutting jobs and aiming to move sponsorship money away from headquarters costs and towards training centres athletics club.[2] De Vos also cut down the number of athletes going to the 2008 Beijing Olympics, minimising the number to those who would still be young enough to perform at the 2012 London Olympics.[4] He has a strong anti-doping stance, favouring a lifetime ban for athletes caught using banned substances. After attempting to ban Dwain Chambers from an athletics comeback, he underlined the damage Justin Gatlin caused to United States athletics as an example for his reasoning.[5]

Personal life

He is married (to Kirsten), with two children.

gollark: > Well, the answer is a good cause for flame war, but I will risk. ;) At first, I find assembly language much more readable than HLL languages and especially C-like languages with their weird syntax. > At second, all my tests show, that in real-life applications assembly language always gives at least 200% performance boost. The problem is not the quality of the compilers. It is because the humans write programs in assembly language very different than programs in HLL. Notice, that you can write HLL program as fast as an assembly language program, but you will end with very, very unreadable and hard for support code. In the same time, the assembly version will be pretty readable and easy for support. > The performance is especially important for server applications, because the program runs on hired hardware and you are paying for every second CPU time and every byte RAM. AsmBB for example can run on very cheap shared web hosting and still to serve hundreds of users simultaneously.
gollark: https://board.asm32.info/asmbb/asmbb-v2-9-has-been-released.328/
gollark: Huh, apparently some hugely apioformic entity wrote a bit of forum software entirely in assembly.
gollark: Interesting.
gollark: I have a most marvellous proof which the 2kchar message limit is too small to contain.

References
  1. Companies House
  2. Knight, Tom (2007-11-29). "Ruthless Niels de Vos streamlines UK Athletics". The Daily Telegraph. Retrieved 2008-08-25.
  3. "De Vos handed UK Athletics post". BBC Sport. 2007-01-30. Retrieved 2008-08-25.
  4. Knight, Tom (2007-08-08). "Niels De Vos plans overhaul for Olympics". The Daily Telegraph. Retrieved 2008-08-25.
  5. Broadbent, Rick (2008-02-04). "Dwain Chambers stopped in tracks as Niels de Vos begins cleansing process". The Times. Retrieved 2008-08-25.
Business positions
Preceded by
David Moorcroft		 Chief Executive of UK Athletics
May 2007 - August 2019		 Succeeded by
vacancy
Preceded by
 Commercial Director of Manchester 2002
1999 - 2002		 Succeeded by
Position defunct
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