Two years minus one day to go until the London Olympics and Simon Barnes is getting all misty-eyed in The Times 28/7/10. As he waxes lyrical about the Olympics and, ‘their unique tension, their unique meaning’, he tells us cynics to look elsewhere. I took his advice and turned to Matthew Syed’s column in the sports pages. What a welcome relief. It is not cynicism that Syed was offering but hard nosed realism. And as the London Olympic clock ticks away and the hyperbole become ever more intense we will all be in desperate need of some down to earth realism. Here is a sample of what Barnes might regard as cynicism but which I regard as a much needed breath of fresh air. That entire official marketing bumph from Sebastian Coe was starting to suffocate me.’

Remembering how the old Soviet bloc of nations would use the Olympics to make a national statement, Syed muses,

‘In many ways, the justification for vast state subsidies to Olympic athletes has not changed terrible much over the past quarter of a century. Most of those within the sporting establishment of Britain are more than happy to concede that winning lots of gold medals is primarily about making a bold statement of our national virility ‘ to the world and to ourselves. The phrases are a little different today, of course, and are bereft of ideological vernacular, but they carry a similar meaning. We talk about the feel-good factor, about London 2012 being a chance to make a ‘national declaration’, about the fear that without spending big, we might fail in the medals table and, as a consequence, suffer national humiliation.’

Syed then reflects philosophically:

‘Why the success of athletes in an ancient festival continues to carry such a powerful load in terms of national self-esteem is difficult to unpick. We do not respond in the same emotive way to the success (or otherwise) of architects, medics or even scientists. How many of us could say how many Nobel prize-winners Britain has produced in the past four years? On the contrary, most of us know that we finished forth in the medals table at the 2008 Olympics in Beijing.’

As a means of justification for spending vast resources on elite athletes playing elite sports while our cities crumble and our youth eat and drink themselves into oblivion, our governing masters tell us that it will inspire a new generation to get involved in sport. Syed tells us otherwise.
Fewer any longer bother to argue that Olympic expenditure has anything to do with inspiring youngsters to get involved in sport. The evidence is clear: no nation has managed to increase sporting participation as a result of hosting the Games, a fact acknowledged in official government documents.’

The thing about participation is it needs to be local and accessible. Most Londoners will not go to any Olympic events, but will instead slouch on the coach and watch hundreds of hours of mind numbing national propaganda. After the Games has concluded, everyone will get back to their previous routines a little fatter and a little more lethargic that at the start.

Free swimming for young and old was a step in the right direction but it has just been scrapped. So much for inspiring a new generation of healthy young people. A network of purpose built local cycle paths would be a great legacy and might just get people out of their cars, but they are not being built. A sports centre for every housing estate might just divert young people away from gang culture but the government is axing revenues to local councils. Some leisure centres might even be forced to close. As Syed so poignantly puts it:

‘There is irony in the fact that we crow about our rapid elevation up the Olympic medals table without stopping to consider that it is almost entirely explained- in a statistical sense ‘ by a willingness to divert public money from other areas. In a narcotic and curiously self-referential way, we are purchasing our quadrennial fix of national self-esteem.’

So there you have it; one man’s realism is another man’s cynicism. Of course there is a real choice to be made; nationalist hubris, which will get even more shrill as the 2012 Olympic carnival approaches, or plain speaking, hard-headed realism about the true state of Britain as it stands today. I’ll take the realism any day.