I have to say that I loved every minute of
the London 2012 Olympics. I cheered, whooped, shed tears and jumped up and down
as much as everyone else. It was wonderful to see so many athletes doing
amazing things and of course I was delighted at Team GB successes. I’m a great sports fan anyway and this Games
has been fantastic. For me though, the whole experience has thrown up
contradictions, confusions and the need to analyse just what has happened over
these momentous few weeks. Sport is so
commercialized, male, privileged, elitist, and nationalist – isn’t it? – so how
is it that those of a feminist, leftist, peace-loving persuasion can find it so
compelling? Well, I guess the fact that we can both critique it and find it compelling shows how complex
humans are. Half of me is astounded and
fascinated by what humans can do with their bodies and part of me is saddened
and puzzled that sane people can spend so much time, energy, money and make so
many sacrifices just to shave 0.008 seconds off someone else’s time…..
But, back to the beginning - Danny Boyle’s
opening ceremony was astonishing, dramatically showing how the opening says
something implicit and explicit about the host nation. Before the perfectly honed
bodies of the athletes were paraded, we were treated to human touches so different
from the Beijing opening, with the experiences of everyday people, vulnerable,
funny, brave, on show. Seemingly small touches spoke volumes – Doreen Lawrence,
the mother of the murdered Stephen Lawrence holding the Olympic flag as it came
into the stadium, for example, along with notaries like Ban Ki-Moon. Another flag carrier was a human rights
activist, a category of person, as many have pointed out, locked up before the
Beijing Games. The NHS had a starring
role, the suffragettes made an appearance, and the 1993 Brookside first lesbian
kiss popped up in a montage celebrating the film industry, a kind of snub to
the 150 countries still banning openly gay athletes from competing.
These Olympics smashed the idea of sport
existing in a separate bubble. The sport literally spilled out on to the
streets, but it also raised key questions about diversity and equality. The
opening ceremony was a celebration of the history and diversity of modern
Britain. The backgrounds and stories of
the athletes showed they were connected to the real world, with all its messy
complexity.
The Games have been good for women. For the
first time, all 204 countries taking part sent women, with Saudi Arabia, Qatar
and Burundi sending women for the first time. Team GB’s women had extraordinary
success. This doesn’t mean that women are equal though. In the UK, the Women’s
Sport and Fitness Foundation reports that women’s sport in general receives
only 5% of total media coverage and only 0.5% of corporate sponsorship. Some Olympic Sports were only open to one sex
– synchronized swimming is female-only, but more sports are male-only, with
canoeing a good example of discrimination, and overall there being 30 more
medals available to men than women in the 2012 games. In Saudi Arabia, girls and women are not
allowed to do PE at school, join a sports club or even go to sporting events.
The International Olympics Committee put pressure on the country to send women,
and Wojdan Shaherkani made history by being their first woman from Saudi to
compete, in the judo. She only knew three weeks before the games that she was
to compete, and she didn’t meet the qualifying standard – but that wasn’t the
point. She was one of 4,847 women competing in London, 44% of the total. Not only was it great to see these women
enjoying what they could achieve with their bodies, they have provided a set of
role models for all the other girls and women out there.
The achievements of athletes like Mo Farah
highlight how Europe offers possibilities denied to many from poorer countries;
Mo came to Britain aged 8, his parents hoping for a better life. His twin
remained behind and although then a promising athlete, he has not gone on to
develop this talent. Britain is a country of migrants, and Britain is happy to claim
Mo, but it has also given a boost to Somalis and the Somalian diaspora – he is
the first ethnic Somali to win gold. Sadly, a Somalian athlete at the Beijing
Games was one of those who perished on a boat earlier this year trying to cross
the Mediterranean to escape to a better life in Europe. The links with the
colonial past are clearly seen in the multicultural, multiracial Team GB, and
the BBC commentary team at one point, made up of the white commentator John
Inverdale and three black athletes, all previous medal winners, had a sensitive
and thoughtful discussion about why so many brilliant athletes are black, and
why a white man hasn’t won the 100 metres since 1980. It’s easy to be flippant
and say that black athletes are just better and we could offer all sorts of
cultural and physiological explanations, but the fact that the discussion took
place shows something of the confidence that Britain has in its
multiculturalism. A poll in the last week showed that 68% of respondents agreed
that Britain is stronger as a country of many cultures, rising to 79% in London
and 81% among the 18-24 age group.
It’s noticeable that African athletes and
those from the global South excelled in those sports that didn’t require
expensive equipment. The sports involving horses, boats, bicycles, (and much of
the winter Olympics) are the preserve of the global North, apart from a few
exceptions such as a cyclist from Trinidad and I think I spotted a black rower
from South Africa. This isn’t surprising, of course. To get up and run doesn’t
need resources – though obviously it does to get up to international level, and
that's where people like David Rudisha have been lucky to have been spotted and
enabled to develop their talent. What is perhaps more surprising is how the
athletes and medalists from the UK are still so over-represented by the privileged,
and attended private schools. At the Beijing Games, 50% of GB’s gold medal winners
were from fee-paying schools. One school, Millfield in Somerset taught seven of
the competitors at London 2012, two of them gold medal winners. An estimated quarter of the Team GB was
educated at fee-paying schools (attended by 7% of the population). (Incidentally, two thirds of England’s rugby
team was educated in such schools too.) The facilities at these schools bear no
relation to those at the schools most children attend; Tonbridge School in Kent
for example, has a 25 metre indoor pool, 12 rugby pitches, 18 tennis courts and
an Olympic standard athletics track. Well, I guess this is what the annual
boarding fee of £32, 823 buys. Meanwhile, although there has been a scandal
about the number of school playing fields that have been sold even since the
Olympics, the number of children taking part in competitive sport is up from
58% in 2006/07 to 78% in 2009/10. Yet the
Tory Education Secretary, Michael Gove, on getting into government axed the
£160 million budget for school sports partnerships. The debate about a lasting
sporting legacy from London 2012 rumbles on, with contradictory policy moves.
The athletes exemplify a key idea in health
promotion, that of deferred gratification – putting in hard work and making
sacrifices now for the sake of a pay-off sometime in a distant future. Also
it’s not just individual effort – all
the athletes, winners or losers, thanked their teams – coaches, families, teammates
– in interviews, showing how much of a group effort it all was. They clearly felt a sense of belonging to
something, which spurred them on.
An ICM poll showed that 55% of Britons felt
the Games were worth the investment, as they are helping to cheer the country
in hard economic times.
In terms of legacy, membership of clubs
such as cycling clubs has already gone up and some of the top cyclists have
spoken out for cyclists’ rights to a safer road environment. The fact that Team
GB won so many medals wasn’t just due to home advantage – it showed what a sustained
strategy of substantial investment in sport can achieve. The Games did attract
a lot of corporate funding but also it really shows what public investment can
do, including revitalizing one of the poorest parts of London, and hopefully, leaving
behind an area with factories providing employment, houses and social amenities.
The Games also enabled ordinary people to get involved, and volunteering is
another of those ideas that is being talked about a lot in public health
circles – it appears to help people develop a sense of wellbeing. 70,000 people
were taken on as volunteers for these Games. This kind of community activity,
and joining clubs, generates a sense of belonging and what we increasingly talk
about as social capital; ‘Bowling Alone’
isn’t possible for many sports and for me it’s the sociability, team work,
problem solving and having fun together that’s the real point of sport. It does
concern me that young people get hooked up in the excessive competitiveness
that leads to cheating, or can get obsessed with those hundredths of a second
that make a difference. Making a difference is surely more about using sport to
tackle social issues – racism, homophobia, HIV – or using some of the technology
to solve practical problems. (We have bicycles that can shave seconds off a time
by being more aerodynamic but a bike that can withstand the brutal paths in
parts of the poorer world seems to elude us, for example). It’s a good move
that under the new lottery deal with UK Sport, top athletes have to spend 5
days a year in schools motivating pupils to be more active.
Finally, what about all those amazing
bodies? One man, watching a swimmer, exclaimed, “Look at this…what a beautiful
boy”. That man was the father of the athlete in question, Chad Le Clos, and he
had just beaten Michael Phelps, the so-called greatest Olympian of all time, in
the 200 metres butterfly. He, and all
the other parents, were of course bursting with pride and overwhelmed at what
extraordinary children they had produced. But it was ok for any of us to exclaim at the beauty of
the bodies, as they were amazing:
sport gives us permission to admire such beautiful bodies and what they can do,
without being voyeuristic. The kit worn does seem to have become more
body-revealing over the years, with the men’s diving kit and the women’s for
the beach volley ball especially notable…… but the origin of the Greek games was centered on the beauty of the human
form as much as it was about sporting prowess, with athletes expected to parade
naked. This of course is why some
cultures disapprove of sport, with the link between nakedness, sexuality and
the sporting body. The Paralympics are
about to start and it gives us a chance to appreciate different bodies,
differently beautiful. I’m proud that the Paralympics originated in England,
the inspiration of a German doctor given asylum here from Nazi Germany, Ludwig
Guttmann. The Stoke Mandeville Games evolved into a challenge to prejudicial
views about those who are differently abled, and fuelled the disability movement.
Lastly, just a note on Michael Phelps, who
I mentioned as the “so-called” greatest Olympian. His achievement is fantastic
of course, and he seems a very nice young man. No doubt he has had all the privileges
though and my vote for greatest Olympian would go to his compatriot Jesse
Owens, who defied the racism of the USA and of Nazi Germany to win four gold at
the 1936 German Olympics in front of Hitler. He inspired so many generations of
black American athletes and was a great role model – though maybe not in that
he smoked a pack of cigarettes a day and died in 1980 from lung cancer. He was perhaps in the minds of Tommie Smith
and John Carlos from the USA on the day that they gave the black salute on the
medal podium at the 1968 Games to highlight black poverty, together with the
white Australian Peter Norman. All were supporting the Olympic Project for
Human Rights. The opening and closing ceremonies too, at the London 2012 Games
seemed to reflect some of the social context and politics within which sport
takes place which helps me at least overcome some of those ambiguous feelings
that elite sport creates.
