Collective dismay

Perhaps a slightly jaundiced comment but with a whiff of truth I would think. What does it convey about Juliar Gillard however if it be true?

The overwhelming majority of Olympic sports have no spectator following of any substance and in the case of those which do (such as tennis, basketball and football) the event is peripheral and a nuisance to the normal calendar. Olympians are no longer the outsiders who make it in their own way - as Harold Abrahams was or Don Thompson who won a walking medal in 1960 training on his own, using his own methods. Nor are they genuinely commercial stars like Lewis Hamilton or Didier Drogba. They are Soviet-style, state-subsidised creatures, competing for the benefit of their political masters: "Team GB" with the PM as skipper.

So what is in it for politicians and for the state? The Third Reich, the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China are only the most notable examples of states which have abandoned an initial hostility to the Olympic movement in favour of trying to succeed within it. If David Cameron is looking for a feelgood factor from the 2012 games, which he surely is, he treads in the footsteps of Nazis and Communists.

Certainly it leaves room to contemplate.

 

So what is in it for politicians and for the state? The Third Reich, the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China are only the most notable examples of states which have abandoned an initial hostility to the Olympic movement in favour of trying to succeed within it. If David Cameron is looking for a feelgood factor from the 2012 games, which he surely is, he treads in the footsteps of Nazis and Communists.

There is a kind of mirrored perception factor which can be generated either by winning a lot of medals or by holding a successful games because these things generate a national perception that one is admired elsewhere. They let you strut on the global village green. And this effect comes pretty cheap.

The USSR chose the Olympics rather than the development of a world-beating F1 car or football team because it offered soft targets: not very many western women felt a mission to emulate the likes of Tamara Press, the great Soviet shot putter. In the past I calculated that a sports programme could deliver medals at around £100,000 each - currently two days pay for Wayne Rooney. Subsidising sport in the Soviet style has allowed China to rise to the top of the medals table without much in the way of sporting culture, tradition or infrastructure. And it has allowed the UK to go from one gold medal (+ 14 others) at Atlanta in 1996 to 19 gold (+ 28 others) at Beijing in 2008. And that was during a period in which participation in sport has declined steadily.

But even if one is happy with the idea of creating athletes for the purposes of state propaganda, there are plenty of other reasons why a sportsman - or any citizen - should be sceptical about the Olympic movement. It has been, historically, extremely corrupt in the classic manner of international organisations. (It is a SINGO - a Sporting International Non-Governmental Organisation, a sub category of INGO. Actually, I think I invented the acronym SINGO, but I may be wrong and anyone else is welcome to it.)

There has been corruption in the allocation of games, in the covering up of breaches of rules (including doping) and in the judging of events. The latter includes marking cartels to rival those of the Eurovision Song Contest. I won't dwell on the idea that £12 billion spent on hosting the games is a ridiculous way of spending money, much of it taken from sources that would have gone to grass roots sport and from places that needed money a lot more than London did.

Perhaps like most things in our modern lost world, the perception outweighs the reality.

 All of these criticisms of the games seem to me, at least, rational and informed, but rationality and information have little to do with reality. What is real is what the American sports sociologist Rick Gruneau calls "fairy dust", which turns dross into glamour. The overwhelming majority of people would not normally cross the road to watch gymnastics, weight-lifting or synchronised swimming if they were free - and even track and field athletics is essentially a small and declining sport, but give them the Olympic magic and there is a scramble for tickets, a longing for the chance to say "I was there".