Given the career choice I'm now pursuing I often, because of where I live in East London, get asked whether I'll get to work with Team GB athletes in time for 2012. My usual response is that its unlikely - most of the sports psych positions will be filled already no doubt - but working with younger athletes in my club, who knows for certain?
The view around peers when I've spoken about the Olympics, tends to be optimistic. That it will be great for the area, house prices, a flagging London economy, a neglected part of the East End, a legacy for the future, and a feelgood event that the Worlds eyes will be upon. However, you do get dissenting voices. What about the cost? Likely to be more than current estimates, and likely to be funded by more taxes - but lets not get into that debate for now... the area where the Olympics is and has been contentious is a more philosophical one. For the record, I like the ideal of individuals pitting themselves in competition, to excel at what they can do physically, and as an inspiration for people (think Usain Bolts amazing performance and time in Beijing), and kids in particular. Part of the reason for pursuing this change of career that I thought about this morning, was the upbringing I had, where football, motor racing, tennis and other sports were encouraged, debated at the dinner table, attended and participated in by my family.
However, the philosophy and sociology of sport is something that I've become more interested in over the last few years. It can be positive, but also negative. Blood doping in cycling taints the Tour de France more than anything. Its so exciting to watch, but yeah, loses its lustre when leader after leader is thrown out after being caught. People rightly ask, "Is it the rider or the enhancers that lead to that winning performance?" The same too with the Olympics. The chase for victory leading to many instances of drug cheats and corrupting the 'ideal'. And similarly, a pet bugbear of mine, but one that is so prominent you have to remind yourself these days of - the commercialisation of sport. I could write a whole section on the blog about this but I read today about a sports writer who died this week and who asked those difficult questions about sport, gave his opinion (bilous at times) and didn't just tow the party line. The Guardian printed this as an obituary on their site and as an example of his pieces the article below on the loss of the Olympic ideal and what is wrong with the games. I don't apologise for his language or the courage of his convictions. Corporate Steven Wells wasn't. Forthright he was. Let his belief and conviction be his testament and example to us all, whatever your views. RIP.
On why we should boycott the Olympics Steven Wells - 22 July 2008.
"The history of the modern Olympic movement is one long, sad litany of imperialism, racism, exploitation and oppression. But that's not why I think we should boycott the Olympics. And I do think we should boycott them. Not just the Beijing games. All of them. Forever. Why? Because of the total disconnect between what the Olympics are supposed to be about (grace, beauty, athleticism, sportsmanship, solidarity, brotherhood and the human spirit) and the sordid reality — as superbly illustrated by what the preparations for the 2012 London games are doing to the Manor Garden allotments.
"Ask yourself this question: are the drug-riddled, debased and corrupt Olympics worth the demolition of a single 80-year-old community institution that genuinely and continually promotes health, mental wellbeing, exercise, neighbourliness and fresh vegetables? And (while we're at it) was it worth ripping up the much-loved and heavily used five-a-side football pitches in East London's Spitalfields market just so the City of London could have yet another identikit shopping/office development? (If you answered yes to either question, stop reading and trot off and fellate a stockbroker, you dominant ideology humping Tory bastard).
"Don't get me wrong. I dislike cockney gardeners just as much as the next professional Northern bigot ... but when I see our socialist heritage of collective gardening trampled underfoot by the size-900 Adidas bovver sneakers of soulless corporate sport, I'm there on the front line, jabbing at the scaly, baby-eating, corn-syrup spewing monstrosity with a dung-smeared pitchfork, glotally whining in my best Thames Estuary accented sub-English: Bugger off back to whichever focus-group driven hell spawned you, Nikezilla. Ils ne passeront pas, me old cock sparrer, ils ne passeront bleedin' pas.
"What are these Olympics anyway? Every square inch of its corporate jism-soaked soul is fully owned by one crap-peddling multinational monster or another. And all the major events are dominated by freakish, faceless, unreal, disconnected, socially-crippled identikit meta-humans, most (if not all) of them as keenly engaged in an ever-escalating techno-war with the drug testers as they are in actually running, jumping or throwing stuff.
"Why should I cheer these freaks on? Because they supposedly represent the patch of dirt I was born on? Is it not absurd that an event so wedded to the increasingly redundant 18th-century notion of the nation state should be owned lock, stock and logo-plastered barrel by nationless corporations, all of whom automatically shift production to anywhere the grateful peasants will work for a dollar a day (and all the rice and rat meat they can eat) at the drop of a spread sheet?
"The fact is that we have irrevocably lost the Olympics to the dumb, piggish maelstrom of corruption, blind self-interest, amorality, blandness, hypocrisy and lowest-common-denominator aesthetics that is corporate capitalism. And no amount of hand wringing or faux-nostalgic bleating about Corinthian values is ever going to bring it back.
"... When the corporations start to sniff around the edges of these events (as they already do, the bastards) we should kvetch like billy-o. No, not because it'll do any good, but because not to do so means to accept cultural brain-death, to become sports Tories, to march in corporate sponsored official replica shirt-wearing lockstep into a new serfdom where our only functions are to slave and consume.
"I give you the NFL, the NBA, the Premier League and every other professional league on the planet, all of them to a greater or lesser degree on the slippery slope to soulless shut-up-and-consume McSports status"
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