Olympics

Apparently Gordon Brown's plan to micromanage British sport for the next four years is hitting trouble...

...but I can't see what all the fuss is about personally. After all, the British Lions combined rugby team does not jeopardise the competitiveness of the various home nations' independent rugby international teams does it?

Mind you, if they do keep on tinkering with the sporting bodies themselves don't they stand a chance under IOC rules of getting the entire team GB banned from the next Olympics. Wouldn't that be somewhat embarrassing. On the other hand, if they ban us now, perhaps we can stop spending all that money on a hole in the ground in East London... :-)

Even if, like me, you have studiously avoided watching any of the Olympic coverage, you will probably have seen the odd medals table on a news program or something. They all show the glorious People's Republic beating the evil Empire and its Poodle into second and third place respectively. But hang on, the host nation is the largest nation on earth by population and, whether or not there has been any cheating, such as using babies in the gymnastics or whatever, the simple fact is that their human resources are vast. So, as a completely meaningless bit of fun, I have compared the medals table (at least those nations who have won golds) with their respective populations.

Looking at it this way, we find Jamaica in first place with tiny Bahrain in second. Georgia beats Russia by a mile. Team GB are down in 15th place, but that is well ahead of Russia (25), the United States (29) and the Glorious People's Fatherland is way down at 45th out of 53 countries who won any gold medals at all.

Eat your pants, China! If they had won just one gold, Taiwan would have beaten you by a country mile!

Here's the full list:

Now, after all the spin, I wonder how many of the Chinese gold medalists are going to have bits amputated by the Glorious Central Committee of the People's Games so that they might also win in the Paralympics?

We are always told that the Olympics should not be political. Our government refused to mandate a boycott of Beijing because they have no control over the British Olympic Association. The Iraqi team last I saw was waiting to hear whether they could go because the Iraqi government recently sacked the entire national Olympic committee. We're not supposed to score political points over this "greatest show on earth" of "amateur" sporting prowess.

So why are so many politicians spending fortunes of our money falling over themselves to be in Beijing? Troughs...pigs...hmmm, spare ribs!

All this brouhaha about the Olympics, torches, boycotts and so on has not passed me by. I hear all sorts of stuff from the "athletes' side" about how the Olympics is not political, about how people have trained all their lives to get to this supreme test of their skills and abilities against others from every nation on earth. I have some sympathy with that. I was once quite a competitive fencer. I used to love the competitions (second in the West Midlands under 16s foil if you're interested and can believe it!) and I can only imagine the excitement and satisfaction of having made it to the very top on the planet in your discipline.

But saying that the Olympics is not political seems to me nowadays like saying it's non-commercial and strictly amateur - at least the latter has been the case within my life time. But, as we all saw on 7th July 2005 (when there wasn't other news on that day), the choice of venue is intensely political, certainly in the sense that politicians are deeply involved in it. It can (and has already in the case of London) make people fortunes, that others pay for.

I admit to having had misgivings when Beijing was awarded the games - I don't like the fact that Formula One has a race there, though in a sense that's less of an issue because F1 is an unashamedly commercial, big money, oligarchic event that pays but lip service to the troubles of "little people" and with no loftier ideals such as the Olympic movement professes. But I, along with many others it seems, did hope that having such a high profile international event, together with their growing commercial and economic presence in the world, would focus minds in China on reform. Until I think it was last year sometime that someone high up in the Chinese government said something to the effect that China would never be a liberal democracy ("over my dead body" by implication). I accept that moving such a huge population to full democracy would take time, but this was a "never, never, never" type of statement.

Ever since I have thought that "we" should somehow object to the whole shebang and the credence it gives to the veneer of acceptability. I know that in 1980 the Moscow regime was pretty similar to Beijing's and that the boycott then was a specific protest about the invasion of Afghanistan (oh how we can now ruefully laugh about that!) and it did no good whatever so far as I can remember - though even then, China joined the boycott. So as an organized thing, I'm not sure a "national" boycott will do any good this time either. However, as in 1980, there are other symbolic objections we in the democratic world can make. Athletes could attend and take part under the flag of the Olympic movement rather than their national flags and anthems for example.

But it is pure fantasy to say that the Olympics are non-political - they never have been in reality, even long before they became a festival for junk food vendors and sweat shop employers to tout their tawdry wares and part of a professional athlete's career progression. The Soviet Union - and other countries within their sphere of influence - didn't take part from 1928 till 1952. African nations withdrew in protest at South Africa and Rhodesia being allowed to take part in the seventies. If it really were apolitical, why does the torch even go anywhere near Downing Street - surely if it's all above politics it should be a royal occasion.

Personally, if any athlete choses voluntarily, having gained a place in the team, not to attend, putting lives in Darfur, Tibet or, so far little mentioned despite last year's riots and crackdown, Burma before their personal attainment, they'll have my full support and they ought not to be punished or denigrated for making that sacrifice.