With the exception of the state sponsored Chinese competitors, can you imagine any of the Olympic athletes competing at the winter games in Vancouver being from anywhere other than a privileged background? I’m happy to be proven wrong but the sort of lifestyle required to be slogging up and down ski slopes and the like just does not seem to chime with the day to day grind of working class life. And if the odd proletarian competitor did slip through the net, you can rest assured they are even more unlikely to be among the medal winners.

Tobogganing just doesn’t figure highly in the leisure pursuits in the housing estates of Britain. If that is true of these islands, it is triply true for the citizens of the developing world. So in an instance, something like nine tenths of the world’s population are immediately disenfranchised from the winter Olympics. It is a festival of games to be played by the wealthy and enjoyed by the wealthy. Only to a slightly lesser degree, a similar argument can be constructed for the summer Olympics and nobody has done a better job in presenting that argument than Matthew Syed in The Times 10/02/10.

In an article slipped into the magazine style section of the paper, Times 2, Syed is at his journalistic best, and with his kind permission, I have reprinted large swathes of his article. It is just too important to be left tucked away in the obscure, inside pages of The Times. Syed starts off with a stinging attack on the elitist nature of the Olympic Games. He knows what he’s talking about because he has been there, not as a tourist spectator, but as a member of Team GB. Just listen to what he has to say:

“I am often asked what it is like to be part of Team GB at the Olympic Games. My answer is always the same. Look beyond the obvious stuff – the rivers of testosterone, the insane ambition and the lust for glory. Look beyond the post competition fraternising, so widespread and competitive that it could be a medal event all on its own. Look beyond that and what are you left with? Well in a word, Posh. With a capital P.”

After that opening paragraph I’m hooked. The next paragraph is no less damning. Syed is just not in the mood to mince his words. He continues:

“How can I describe it? Imagine a strawberry and Pimm’s garden party with lots of oversized pectorials and gluteals bustling for space and you get a sense of the ambience in the Great Britain section of the athletes village. I played my first Olympics in Barcelona in 1992 and the pre-competition reception hosted by the Princess Royal was more formal than a Bullington Club bash.”

Having set the scene, Syed then brings in some indisputable statistics to show that competing in the Olympic Games for Britain is not the end result of a healthy meritocracy but rather the inevitable result of a class ridden society like most endeavours in Britain today. Syed presses home his argument:

“look at the statistics and you will see instantly the connection between Posh and podium. According to a report leaked last week, more than a third of British competitors at the London Olympics in 2012 will hail from private schools – a staggering figure when you consider that only 7 percent of children are educated in the independent (private) sector. But consider this too: a full 58 percent of athletes who won gold at the 2004 Olympics in Athens were educated at private schools, including a good few from the super-elite public schools such as Eton.”

As for sport, so for nearly all sections of British society. Syed concurs:

“isn’t it extraordinary that state schools are so chronically underrepresented? Isn’t it disquieting that, after hundreds of millions of pounds have been splurged in an attempt to get kids from inner city comprehensives on the podium in 2012, the whole thing is still dominated by the fee paying minority? Isn’t it curious that an arena as seemingly transparent and objective as sport is as class-ridden as the judiciary?”

Well, even if we consider the so called egalitarian policies of government to be sincere, it only goes to show just how entrenched the class system is in this country. As a de facto parent with a step-daughter who harbours dreams of making the GB Olympic table tennis team sometime in the future, I cannot help but notice just how half-hearted the government funding agencies are in getting working class kids through to the elite level. If the parents aren’t loaded it’s near on impossible for kids to compete at the highest level. Fact. The first part of Syed’s thesis is important enough but the second part gets right to the very nub of the problem and covers territory that is rarely tackled: Olympic elitism on a global scale. Syed poses the right questions and then provides the exact right answers.

“So the question is: why are those who went to state schools failing to punch their weight in Team GB?

Answering his own rhetorical question, Syed explains…

“the answer is both simple and depressing: the Olympic Games is chock-full of rich men’s sports – the kind that are difficult to play and all but impossible to excel in without oodles of cash. The origins of this preponderance are not hard to find: when the Frenchman Baron Pierre de Coubertin founded the modern Olympic movement, he packed it with sports beloved by him and his fellow aristocrats. The legacy of that bias can still be seen today in the medal allocations: rowing has 14 events, sailing 11 and equestrianism six. If the Olympic Committee believes that these sports are accessible to anyone beyond a tiny clique at the top of the economic pile, it is deeply deluded.

Syed is now unstoppable as he approaches the home sprint:

“But if the lower socioeconomic groups in the UK are struggling to make an impact at the Games, consider the global imbalance. India, a country with almost a fifth of the world’s population, won less than a fifth of one percent of the medals available in Athens in 2004. Africa, a continent dripping with sporting talent, won only four percent of the available medals. In the winter Olympics no athlete from a third world country has ever won a medal.”

And then in the most powerful punch of the entire article, Syed gives us this:

“We like to kid ourselves that Redgrave is the greatest British sportsman in history so far, for winning five successive gold medals in rowing – a sport so elitist that it is virtually non-existent across much of the planet. I suspect that Redgrave would not have qualified for a single Olympic final, let alone won any, had rowing been accessible to say 1 percent of the population of Africa.”

Ouch! Syed’s concluding remarks hit their target with javelin like precision:

“The government’s approach to sport is entirely skew-whiff. Because the policy is largely about winning as many Olympic medals as possible, millions are being thrown at minority interest, high-cost sports that are about as accessible as the Royal Enclosure at Ascot. The Posh bias at the Olympic Games is not inevitable and needs to be confronted. The next time Lord Coe or a government minister proclaims the Olympics as “a festival that unites the world”, he or she will deserve a gold medal for comedy.”

How many sports journalist have dared to question the very composition of the Olympics? Not too many I fear. Nearly all just go along with the razzmatazz every four years, blindly accepting the current format of the modern Olympic Games as if it was God sent, from the ancient Greeks. The thing about class society is that it is so entrenched, so much a part of the status quo, that it appears to most to be the natural order of things, and that consequently, very few people ever dream of questioning its validity to the modern world. Syed has dared to question. He has questioned the Games at its most fundamental level and that is why his article is so radical compared to the millions of words of journalist tosh that are spewed out so routinely. He has questioned the class nature of the Games and now the genie is out of the bottle, the authorities are going to have to fight tooth and nail to get it back inside. It’s a gold medal for Syed for journalist rigour and at present he stands alone on the podium. Shame on the Guardian sports writers for their toadying acquiescence to the Olympic status quo.