Olympic glory, but at what price?
The Olympics are over, team GB (whatever happened to Northern Ireland??) have wiped the floor with everyone bar the Americans and the country has put the Brexit blues behind it and started feeling good about itself again. Seb Coe is going around with a smile wider than his wallet pocket, scorning the people who had doubted the legacy he had promised London would deliver. Bring on Toykio. How long it will last, who can say, but for now we can bask in the golden hue of an unprecedented medal haul which is the envy of our competitors (particularly the Aussies!)
And yet, that success has comuge price. Since the 2000 Olympics in Athens more than £1bn has been spent, or invested depending on your point of view, in funding our elite athletes. That equates to £5.5m for every medal won since that time. Record medal hauls at the last 2 Olympics would suggest that money has been invested very effectively, and the country has thrilled at the success of our athletes. But is that really the best, or most equitable, use of scarce resources? Should not the proceeds from the lottery be spread across the whole population, ideally with those least well off getting the most benefit, not ring-fenced for a relatively tiny elite group of super athletes, 26% of whom went to private school?
Now, if it were the case that our sporting and community facilities across the country were first class, or at least fit for purpose, this perhaps wouldn’t matter so much. However, as anyone knows who is involved in grassroots sport, by and large, the state of facilities in this country are little a short of a disgrace. If I had a pound for every time I had turned up at a council run football pitch, to be confronted by a churned up field masquerading as a playing surface, and changing rooms resembling unkempt rabbit hutches, well, I wouldn’t be writing this article.
In a personal capacity I help run a junior football section at our local sports club in Leeds. Twice in the last 12 months I have put in a bid for £500 of funding to Leeds City Council, to help pay for a container to keep the junior soccer goals and ancillary equipment in. Twice we have been turned down, because whilst ours was a good project, there simply wasn’t enough money to go around, and others were deemed ‘more needy’.
In a professional capacity, at YBY we have a monumental, ongoing struggle to find anyone with funding to support us in supporting communities improve their community and sports facilities. As austerity bites and Councils facing average cuts to their budgets of around 20%, libraries are closing down all over the country, community centres are struggling to stay afloat and our parks, according to English Heritage, are in crisis. Most councils we come across in the north now have literally no capital budgets left for parks or play areas. When a piece of equipment gets damaged, or comes to the end of its shelf life, they get taken out, never to be replaced. Every 2 weeks on average a school gets the go ahead to sell off playing field land, programmes that supported sport in school such as the school/sport partnerships were abolished in 2011 and I’ve never come across a primary school that has a full time specialist PE teacher.
If that wasn’t bad enough, the much heralded legacy effect of the London Olympics (which diverted another £2.2bn from the national lottery) is keeping a very low profile. Overall participation rates in sport are actually down since 2010, 57% of people never play sport and 52% of children leave primary school unable to swim a length of the pool. The effects on our health are truly shocking, 25% of the population is obese (the figure is nearer a third for children), almost double the figure in the 1990’s, and two thirds of the population are overweight. Roughly .00006% of those who play sport achieve elite sporting success, but everyone can benefit from getting more active, and that activity has massive physical, mental and social benefits for all who participate, at whatever level.
Maybe it is no coincidence that one of the few developed countries that has higher obesity levels, is more unequal and has even more acute health problems is the country above us in the medals table, the US.
I do love the Olympics, always have, and can’t help but get an extra buzz when a UK competitor is a real contender. But if we genuinely want to increase grass roots participation in sport, and in doing so tackle the growing health and obesity crisis in our country, can we really justify diverting £80m a year and rising, in order to fund a tiny sporting elite to bring home the gold? My daughters are 12 and 14, I would much rather in 4 years time they are making the most of some fantastic new sports facilities, not sat on the sofa cheering on our 75th gold that has cost the equivalent of a decent sized swimming pool.
