I learned today that were was exactly two years to go before the official start of the London Olympics so I rushed out to buy a selection of newspapers to see what they had to say. I was sorely disappointed. I scanned through copies of The Times, The Telegraph and The Guardian and only the later attempted some serious journalism. The first two publications offered nothing but bland platitudes about medal hopes, organisational matters and legacy hopes. Both printed Seb Coe’s vacuous ‘Plan Your Games’ speech without any corresponding editorial comment. It was left to The Guardian’s Owen Gibson, one of Britain’s most rigorous sports journalists, to dig a little deeper behind the headlines. Gibson has a proud record in this respect.

 

The central dilemma facing the Olympic authorities is how to deliver on their high flying promises given the financial axe that is hovering over all government expenditure right at this present moment. It was always going to be a big ask to deliver on these promises even without the looming cuts. This was partly due to the under-funding of the legacy component in the first place, and partly due to the complete lack of coherence and vision as to what the legacy was to be about. Even the eventual fate of the Olympic stadium itself is still up for grabs with the most likely outcome that it becomes an extension of some corporate monolith. The local East London community need not hold its breath.  As for getting an extra two million Britons engaged in regular sport, well that target is fading fast.  It’s simple; a corporate agenda does not fit neatly with the needs of Britain’s local communities, hence the unsolvable conflict of interest at the heart of the London Olympics. Now if every school in East London had free access to the Olympic facilities after the games; that would be an outstanding legacy. But you know that won’t happen because it doesn’t meet the needs of corporate Britain and its insatiable thirst for profits at our expense.

 

Gibson scratches under the surface Olympic rhetoric to offer his readers something to ponder.

 

‘The so called “soft legacy” is also a pressing concern. On the one hand the new government has made the sports participation legacy a key priority. On the other, it appears to be preparing to drop targets, introduced by the previous administration, towards which Sport England has made only glacial progress. The idea that a home Olympics could inspire a generation of young people to play more sport will be further tested by the looming cuts in spending on facilities by local authorities and the lack of any meaningful progress in raising the profile and standing of coaching as a profession.’

 

We’ve already seen the new Tory government axe Labour’s free swimming idea for the young and elderly, an imaginative and relatively cheap idea that proved, in its short life, to be a grassroots winner. If the Tories can vandalise such a popular scheme, further attacks on the community sport legacy programme will come as no surprise. Boris Johnston’s revolutionary twelve cycle routes into the city may be the next to face the axe.

 

We learnt yesterday that Sport England, the body charged with promoting grassroots sport is to be merged with UK Sport, the body charged with administrating elite sport in the UK, under the pretext of financial efficiency. It could potentially be a useful idea but the most likely result will be an over emphasis on winning medals at the expense of promoting the vital and wide-ranging benefits of community sports. Britain may retain forth place in the medals table or even supplant Russia in third place but to what avail if the nation sinks ever deeper into obesity, passivity and alienation. The two sporting agendas are not mutually exclusive and in fact should compliment each other but we should fear the worst.

 

Healthy, active and connected communities will, in the long run, save billions in government expenditure, both in the health service and the criminal justice system. In Britain today, far too many people are disconnected from any purposeful activity. They feel excluded; on the outside looking in. And, as the old saying goes; if you continue to exclude people from the village, in the end they’ll burn the village down.

 

End JPK 28/7/10 Copyright

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