Socialist Resistance

An archive of socialistresistance.org, 2002–2022

Review/comment London Olympics ... costs soar to new heights

by Andy Newman  |  Socialist Resistance no42  |  page 22

This is scanned newsprint, not web text. The original PDFs carried no text layer at all, so every word here was read off the page by OCR. Expect dropped opening letters, run-together words and wrong characters. There was no contents page to cut the paper up by, so the articles were found from the size of their headlines: a headline may carry its kicker, and where an article ran beside a boxed panel a few lines of the neighbour can appear. The scanned issue is the authority; this text is here so the words can be found at all.

At the recent meeting of the International Olympic Committee in Lausanne, Gilbert Felli, the Games' executive director spoke of their concern that the bill for the London games in 2012 could be as much as £8 billion - compared with the original estimate of £2.375 billion.

This overspend was totally predictable. According to the Auditor-General of New South Wales, the Sydney 2000 Games ended up costing over twice the pre-bid figures. In Athens, total costs was at least four times as high as the bid committee's initial budget.

The biggest financial impact is likely to fall on the voluntary sector which will lose an estimated £315 million as the Big Lottery Fund (BLF) will be "raided" to bail out the Olympics.

This means, in practical terms, that the BLF won't be able to fund any new programmes until 2013 and it would also have to make reductions of around €350 million in existing programmes.

Sir Clive Booth, chair of the Big Lottery Fund argues this, "would have a chronic ber a park was promised?

But it is vitally important to also recognise that the ideology behind the Olympics is completely bankrupt, and of no benefit to working people.

At its most blatant, the Department of Culture, Media and Sport has admitted that £340 million will be channelled from the existing sports lottery distributors.

So the Olympics will actually take money away from participative sport provision for ordinary people, and channel it towards elite professional athletes.

Already for the Beijing Olympics planned for 2008 UK Sport, the body that distributes funding under the World Class performance Programme is spending £57.5 million supporting just 320 elite competitors, plus a further £16 million to their sporting bodies.

This includes £600,000 to support one professional weightlifter; €5.3 million for the equestrian team, £2 million for high diving, and over E1 million for the archery team. The aim of UK Sport is to increase Britain's Olympic sports where there is mass participation or even spectator interest.

It is focussed onto activities where individuals can be groomed to produce maximum results. We will have the appalling spectacle of a flag waving extravaganza of national chauvinism, where the Queen and Prime Minister wrap themselves in the Union Jack; and we are encouraged to have a vicarious identification with elite athletes participating in sports that outside of the Olympic time none of us take any interest in, just because through accident they carry 4 the same passport as us.

What is more, the training infrastructure and the development of sports science is much more advanced in the developed economies of the imperialist powers.

So every four years the Olympics gives an opportunity for the great powers to ideologically demonstrate that their world dominance is underpinned by an implicit biological and racial superiority.

This is part of the impetus behind the prestige of holding the games - an orgy of conspicuous consumption that validates the host nation as a major power.