Jon Bright (London, OK): I am, I must admit, a 'sports' fan, in the truest sense of the word. I find sports entertaining to watch. Whatever the sport, the basic mix of competition, personalities, tension and drama remain roughly the same. I find it in the World Cup and I find it almost as much in the World Darts championship (I have been rooting for Martin Adams for the better part of my life). I'm enjoying the masters snooker at the moment, a sport which seems to many people to go out of its way to be boring.
I mention this to prove I have the credentials, as it were, to make the next claim: the Olympics is rubbish. It is terrible entertainment. It features a myriad of competitions between athletes who are totally unfamiliar, only a select few of which will actually make it into public consciousness. The physical intensity of the competitions means that most of the ones we do get to know will be past their best by the time the competition comes around again. There is precious little skill involved: the 'highlight' involves 10 men I've never heard of running in a straight line for 10 seconds; other competitions feature people throwing sticks or jumping over fences. The favourite nearly always wins. Our greatest ever Olympian performed the same repetitive rowing motion for 20 odd years of his life, and now occasionally pops up to mournfully talk about the benefits of wheat based breakfasts.
All this would be fine (each to their own, and all that) - apart from the one thing that irks me most of all - the incredible, earth shattering, soul destroying amount of money that goes into producing this monument to tedium. The latest budget, announced in March (and being voted on today), is £9.3 billion. The initial budget, which presumably was based on the hope that Olympic swimming pools and cycle tracks would fall out of the sky, was around £3 billion (the consortium charged with keeping costs down has, to the delight of irony fans worldwide, been paid a bonus of £10m). The whole thing is being financed by incredible, swinging raids on various parts of our budget for other cultural and sporting activities (the full details of which are not quite clear). £2.17 bn is being sucked out of the national lottery. £1.17 bn is coming out of the GLA. An extra £55 million has been swiped from Sport England.
As Adam Price points out, this is money that would have been spread up and down the country but is now being centralised in London - Carmarthenshire, which he represents, stands to lose £6.5 million pounds alone. Of course, not all of that money is being spent on sticks. A lot goes on transport and infrastructure - fine. But I see no intuitive reason why we need an event to justify spending money on transport. And I see no logic behind raiding the cultural and sporting budgets of localities up and down the UK to pay for a better East London line.
Instead, it seems to me a monument to hubris. The desire of politicians to do something great, to change the world forever. Never mind that no-one outside London will see the benefits. Never mind that its being held during Ramadan. Certainly don't worry about giving people a say on it. Just one huge, cathartic splurge of money, which makes fantastic reading in an autobiography, but doesn't necessarily equal a wise use of public finances. While we continue to have a system of government where public projects can be knowingly organised with budgets based on pure fantasy, and where a central executive can raid money from up and down the country to pay for them without being held to account, we will continue to waste enormous sums on things of questionable public benefit. Look out for the World Cup coming soon...
