There are moments when I suddenly realise how old I am, and one was during the closing ceremony of the Paralympics last Sunday. The pride that had gradually swelled within me during this long patriotic summer was extinguished at a stroke by the performance of the rock band Coldplay. Coldplay may be one of the most successful and popular bands in the world, and its leader may be married to Gwyneth Paltrow, but its grim music filled me with despondency and bewilderment. It seems to have been the underlying aim of all four Olympic and Paralympic ceremonies, from Danny Boyle’s onwards, to redefine Britishness for the world, and it may be that rock bands are an important ingredient in this. But the British Games have also prided themselves on their ‘inclusivity’, and I have seldom felt more excluded from anything than from the two closing ceremonies, each being a celebration of contemporary pop music, that most dubious and ephemeral of Britain’s national accomplishments.
But that’s enough fogeyism. What did the Games really achieve? The media have agreed that they gave a huge boost to flagging national morale, thanks to their almost flawless organisation and to the many triumphs of the British participants; and also that they offered a new and attractive image of Britain to the world. These things may both be true, though the Olympics are not really supposed to feed national pride at all, but to celebrate individual sporting achievements, from wherever they may come. But of course nations don’t spend billions of pounds on staging the Games without hoping to earn much national kudos in return. And Britain is no exception, though we have sought to persuade the world that unlike other nations we are tolerant and civilised and can be patriotic without cockiness or arrogance.
This is a difficult posture to adopt convincingly, and it hasn’t wholly convinced me. The reporting of the Games was triumphalist throughout and so tightly focused on British successes that we weren’t normally told how other European nations had fared, even though this would have allowed us the pleasure of gloating patriotically about their relative shortage of medals. Britain’s presentation of itself as modest and self-deprecating seemed at odds with the national euphoria and the ubiquitous Union flags, but foreigners fell for it nevertheless. Shortly before leaving Italy at the end of my summer holiday I picked up a copy of Corriere della Sera, the country’s principal newspaper, and found in it an article by its London correspondent praising the ‘intelligent and tolerant’ way in which Britain, in contrast to China, had created a ‘people’s Games’ from which the government had been sidelined.
The article was fulsome in its praise. The Games had been ‘as the Olympics should be: well-mannered, respectful of cultural diversity, welcoming and efficient’. And unlike the Games at Beijing, Athens, Sydney and Atlanta, they had been free of political exploitation. Whereas in Italy even small events involved fleets of official cars and police escorts, the British Prime Minister came to the Games by underground and Prince Philip arrived with only two bodyguards. Again unlike Beijing, which used the Games to advertise itself as the ‘coming Eldorado’, London ‘had no messages to send to the world’. ‘Perhaps,’ concluded Corriere, ‘there is no other capital city in the world where the Olympics could be so involving, without pretension and without arrogance. Normal, that’s all. And therefore fantastic.’
It must be highly gratifying for the British Olympic authorities that such an article should appear in a foreign newspaper, for this is precisely the impression they have been trying to convey — Britain’s ‘message to the world’, in fact. So convinced by it was Corriere’s correspondent that he even dismissed Boris Johnson’s antics at the Games as ‘only a cabaret act’, whereas we of course know better. And if David Cameron has not made political capital out of the Games, it is not for want of trying. Corriere was right in one way: these Olympics were the ‘people’s Games’ because people genuinely loved them. But this hardly means that they have been unpolluted by politics. Leaders of the Trades Union Congress have even been using them this week as a justification for strike action, hard though that argument is to follow. Meanwhile, Boris Johnson is urging us to retain the ‘general happiness and a sense of wellbeing’ that the Olympics and Paralympics have engendered. But what with Coldplay and the TUC, I fear I may find this rather difficult.
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