The Olympics are a gigantic folly – and you still have time to be part of it
Would you like to compete for Britain at the 2012 Olympics? No, seriously, compete in the real Olympics, march in the athletes’ parade, wear our national colours? Vacancies are still available. Complete beginners most welcome — no experience necessary. You don’t even have to be, well, British. I promise I am not making this up.
Among the many inventive ways which London 2012 has devised to waste public money, Team GB Handball is my personal favourite. Three million pounds is being spent to create, from scratch, a British Olympic squad in a sport which virtually nobody in Britain has ever played. And in the Olympic Park, £44 million — enough for a new hospital wing — has gone on a 7,000-seat arena for handball, a sport whose entire British fan base could have been fitted into the nearest convenient school gym.
If no one plays handball, where do we get the players? Well that, readers, is where you come in. As the British Handball Association website this week puts it, ‘Do you have an Olympic dream? London 2012, Rio 2016, and beyond? We need you to help us to reach higher heights as we pursue our own Olympic Dream for London in 2012… Think you have what it takes? Then simply complete the form below and our coaching staff will be in touch.’ The form includes the question: ‘Played handball before? Yes/No.’ If you missed out on Olympic tickets, it is, I suppose, one way of getting in without posing as Sepp Blatter’s personal food taster.
Alas, as so often in our great country, a lack of skilled British workers means the jobs have gone to EU migrants. According to Louise Jukes, one of the handball squad, half the British Olympic team in fact ‘come from Scandinavia, France, Germany and Switzerland’. Ms Jukes herself admits that until she joined her national team ‘I had never even seen a handball match. I got the ball and I didn’t know whether to bounce it like basketball or play netball.’
I don’t mean to belittle Ms Jukes or the other handballers, who have made great sacrifices. There may well even be a certain Eddie the Eagle appeal — though Eddie didn’t cost us £47 million. But British Olympic handball, where players with no real roots in the game will perform in front of spectators with no real interest in it, surely exemplifies the imposed, confected nature of the Olympics: its lack of any true connection to its host city, country or indeed to anything, save the Prussian blueprint of the IOC.
Amid this week’s hype of ‘one year to go’, remember that from the very start, the Olympics has been a cuckolder of cities, a breaker of promises. The main reason we agreed to give them £2.4 billion of public money (the first broken promise — it later rose to £9.3 billion) was not to see a large number of rather minority sports. It was for the pledge of jobs, ‘the creation of wider employment opportunities’, to quote the organisers, ‘in an area of very high unemployment’.
In 2005, unemployment in Newham, the main Olympic borough, was 70 per cent above the London average. In 2011, after six Olympic years, it is still 70 per cent above the London average. Only a fifth of the workers on the site have addresses in the east London Olympic boroughs — and many of those are not permanent residents, but weekly commuters based in local B&Bs. Even Newham’s mayor, Sir Robin Wales, a fervent Games cheerleader, says: ‘The simple fact is that the Olympics has not transformed the local area, or really helped to.’
There are some good things happening near the Olympics, but they have very little to do with it. The Westfield shopping centre at Stratford is a real prize — but its planning application went in years before London even won the Games, and two weeks of sport can have no bearing on its viability. Transport improvements are coming, but almost all, again, were happening already.
In September 2004, Lord Coe promised that ‘more than 9,000 new homes will be created from the Olympic village’ (the actual number is 2,800) and offered us ‘the largest new park in Europe for 200 years’ (after unfortunate size reductions, it will now be the largest for 12 years). Even the promise of the world’s first low-carbon Olympic flame has sadly gone up in smoke.
None of this is very surprising. Building a big swimming pool is a silly way to create homes and jobs. But any attempt to apply reason always triggers a wave of emotional blackmail. By attacking the Olympics, you’re told, you are ‘crushing the dreams of our children’. Since when did the IOC own the franchise on dreams?
In fact, of course, it is the Games which are cramping children’s dreams. Grassroots sport, where kids begin, has been cut by a third to help pay for the Olympics, the most elite sport of all. The handball arena alone has cost just under half what the government spends on all community sport, across the entire country, for a whole year.
The only Olympics which ever benefit their host cities — above all, Barcelona ’92 — are those which spend virtually nothing on new elite sports facilities, instead using the money on the city itself. London, despite its claim as the regeneration Games, has done the exact opposite.
Yet I doubt, I confess, that the public really cares about ‘legacy’. What interests them is the show, the party, and the number of British medals. And it is here, perhaps, that lurks the real danger for London. The biggest row, at least since the cost trebled, has been over how few got tickets. Too many people feel shut out of the party.
Our mundane Olympic buildings will not match Beijing’s architectural thrills. The naffness of London’s logo, mascots, and Beijing handover ceremony raises the nasty suspicion that people with no taste are in charge. Above all, of course, it may be hard to better our extraordinary Beijing medal tally.
London will not be a failure — but it may be an anticlimax. And in three years’ time, as we look out over Seb-henge, its sports mausoleums still struggling to find new purposes in life, we may ask of the Olympics what we have just started to ask of Rupert Murdoch: how did we fall under your spell so long?