One of the major factors behind London’s successful bid for the 2012 Olympic Games was the promise to create a lasting “Olympics legacy” – to rejuvenate some of the poorer areas of London; to get more people participating in sport; to create a set of sporting facilities which will promise future success for British athletes, and so on. But – as the Standard reports today – there are signs that the Government might fail to deliver on (at least some of) that promise.
The figures they’ve got their hands on show that, whilst London as a whole met the Government’s 2002 target to get 85 percent of schools providing their pupils with at least two hours of sporting activity a week, some 15 of the 32 London boroughs didn’t. Crucially, many of the Olympic host boroughs – including Greenwich, Tower Hamlets and Hackney – are among those 15. And – Olympics or no Olympics – it doesn’t augur well for their ability to meet the Government’s latest, more ambitious target to get children doing five hours of sport a week, both in and out of school.
With the London Olympics currently pencilled in as costing £9.3 billion – although some say that figure could rise exponentially – many taxpayers will want to see that the promise of a lasting Olympics legacy isn’t an empty one. The more signs that it might be, the less goodwill there’ll be towards 2012. There’s another story in today’s Standard of a London couple who are willing to become “Olympic martyrs” by refusing to pay the £33 tax for funding the Games. I wonder whether anyone else will be joining them over the next four years?
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