It's a Lottery - but it isn't!
By TMX Archives on 28th Aug 08
With the Olympics already just a memory editor JD takes a quick look at where your money went..SO has everyone been glued to the screen watching the Olympics 12-hours a day for the last fortnight? Me neither.
Apart from the awesome performance of sprinter Usain Bolt re-writing the athletics record books I remain totally underwhelmed by it all and have watched next to none of it. I love the Olympics as it was originally conceived, a simple but meaningful competition celebrating the world's best exponents of track and field. To me, and I am NOT on on my own, the Olympics has lost touch with its roots to become a bloated monster capable of swallowing unlimited billions of yen, dollars and, god help us in four years, pounds. Some of the ‘sports' being catered for are truly laughable – I leave it to you to fill in the blanks as we all have our favourite joke ‘sport'.
I also find it highly amusing watching the nation's press, which normally feed us a daily diet of football, football and football week-in year-out, suddenly waxing lyrical about track cycling, rowing, kayaking and sailing, the latter with its myriad classes of meaningless names, some of which we can't even pronounce (Yling Yling anyone?) let alone know what the hell it is all about.
This is, after all, just a mad frenzy of headline grabbing nonsense with scores of hacks, snappers and execs all busily justifying their all-expenses holiday in China. The BBC alone are reported to have sent the best part of 450 bods to China – every single one of them absolutely necessary of course. The second the Olympics is over, and the obligatory double-decker bus has done a couple of laps of London with the medal-winners on the open top deck, so that the Londoners, Gawd bless 'em all Tiny Tim, can feel like they all won medals, the rowers, kayakers, swimmers, cyclists and Yling Ylingers will all disapear completely from your screens and pages – until they burst back on again for a couple of weeks in four years time. Well, not quite four years this time. A couple of weeks before the London Olympics kicks-off the Saturday supplements will feature a flurry of identical interviews with Ben Ainslie and
Tom Daley and other medal winners and hopefuls whose names I have already forgotten before we all settle down for two weeks of Olympic women's beach volleyball (it's not all bad then...) ping-pong, synchronised nose blowing, etc, etc.
The Olympics does of course allow sports that normally don't even merit a mention in the local press, never mind the Nationals, a welcome dose of exposure to the masses. As happens every year with Wimbledon, when local tennis courts are booked solid for a few days after the competition, some good should, for a short time, come from the exposure. A few people will sign-up for a bash in a kayak or maybe a Yling Yling, maybe more will want to flash round a velodrome or perhaps try-out the Modern Pentathlon (Go on, name the five sports – ten points bonus if you get them all!).
Actually, the one ‘alternative' sport that I thought came over really well was the BMX racing. It lends itself well to your average telly watcher. It is short, sharp and simple enough for the dumbest couch potato (me), to follow. In short there is a beginning, a middle and an end. Unfortunately for me, the only BMX race I actually caught was the final in which the unfortunate Shanaze Reade crashed-out while going for gold. And she bore the disappointment amazingly well. No embarrassing John Terry-like bawling like a baby, just a statement that she was happy to go for broke and that she was determined to do her best, which she did.
So, will any of these ‘hidden' sports really gain lasting benefit from their sudden exposure to daylight. Will any expansion off the back of the Beijing Olympics really last for four years and spawn a new crop of winners? Or, as I actually suspect, will it really all be down, as usual, to a couple of dozen individuals with the self-belief and iron will to succeed who would have driven themselves to this anyway, whatever their sporting discipline, even if their sport never received any media attention. History tells us that no lasting sporting benefit has been enjoyed by any Olympic-hosting city.
Did you know that Britain's 19 gold medals won in Beijing came at the cost of a mind-blowing £15,000,000 EACH of Lottery Funding? Our joke relay runners alone held training sessions that hoovered-up a massive £500,000 of cash – and they couldn't even pass the baton!
And my point? Remind me, how much our MX des Nations and Trial des Nations teams will be receiving from the National Lottery Fund?
That'll be nothing then...