A gold medal for idiocy

30 July 2011

The Olympics are a gigantic folly – and you still have time to be part of it

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?

Andrew Gilligan is London editor of the Telegraph Media Group.