The Great Olympics Debate

Two counter posing views on what Britain's Olympics success means.

In the Blue corner we have Peter Hitchens, a man for whom the glass is always half empty:

"Isn’t this British Olympic boasting all rather East German?

Huge state-directed resources have been devoted to gathering supposed glory at a world sports festival.

But these medals do not tell the truth about what sort of nation we are at all. [...]

East Germany had a similar aim when it spent millions to produce medal winners.

The country itself was a backward, dirty dump, run by horrible old men and women, shrouded in a smog of two-stroke exhaust, brown coal smoke and cabbage fumes.

But at the Olympics it managed to appear to be modern, clean, youthful and bright.

And we have to pretend that Olympic success matters, just as they did, because we have nothing else to be proud of.

We achieve this by levying a tax on the sad, the deluded and the hopeless, called the National Lottery, and spending the money bamboozled out of these poor people on velodromes where cyclists dressed as spacemen whizz endlessly round under the cold gaze of ruthless trainers.

And how odd it is that all this effort, all this money and talent should have been devoted to succeeding in a contest which is, deep down, quite meaningless.

Politicians of all the Liberal Elite parties join in praising the way it has been done. Yet if anyone advocates the same methods in our State education system – ruthless selection, encouragement of the best, harsh discipline, no tolerance of failure – he is dismissed by the same politicians as an ‘elitist’.

Well, excuse me, but isn’t it far more important that we survive as an economy and a society in this hard, competitive and increasingly merciless world than that we gain a few shiny knick-knacks in an athletics meeting?

Let John Major, Michael Gove, Gordon Brown, Tessa Jowell and the rest of the supporters of comprehensive schools and diluted exams and socialised university entrance apply their principles to Britain’s 2012 Olympic team.

Your parents went to university? You’re rejected, so as to give an opportunity to someone who can’t swim as fast but needs encouragement.

You went to a private school? You’re rejected, too. We can’t have any privilege here, even if your parents bankrupted themselves to pay the fees. Your place will go to someone slower and less fit.

You passed a tough test way ahead of the others? Sorry, you’ll just have to go at the speed of the slowest in a mixed-ability training squad.

You’re talented but you live in a poor area? Too bad. All our best training schemes are in rich suburbs.

Your training is constantly interrupted by bullying, swearing and loutish behaviour? Too bad. Here’s a copy of our ‘anti-bullying policy’.

You’re doing really well? No help for you, then. Our concern is for equality, not excellence.

You’re slow, undisciplined, disruptive and no good? Have a special trainer and lots of resources.

If we nurtured our Olympic hopefuls the way we educate our children, the only role they’d have in any Games would be sweeping up litter in the stadium.

I have seldom seen a better example of an entire country getting its priorities wrong.

The day will come, and quite soon, when we win no medals and realise what we have become.

But I suspect, by then, it will be too late.'

Hoorah for Hitchens! When the country's basking in the sunny glow of all of those golds he comes along with a ruddy great black storm cloud.

In the red corner we have the New Labour apologist and Times Columnist, David Aaronovitch:

"One must be empathic. If I was a rank-and-file reactionary Conservative, forced to swallow political failure for more than a decade, and now permitted, lizard-like, to come out of my smelly culvert to claim a place on the sunny rock, I might let the light go to my head too. I might preen my scales and tell tales of the decline - no, the breaking - of Britain under Labour.

But one can take empathy too far. It seems impossible to counter the triumphal gloominess of the old Right with anything as feeble, as unconvincing, as facts. The best figures available show crime has gone down, but we know, we know, we know it has gone up! The best figures available suggest improving performance at GCSE and A levels, but we know, we know, we know that this is because of a dilution in standards!

Then along come the Olympics, and the national narrative, for a moment, no longer favours the lizard class and its story of decline. So let me make the most of it, in this short interval before pessimism sets in again. In 1996, after 17 years of Conservative government, the past six under the premiership of the cricketing Major, Great Britain went to the Atlanta Olympics and won precisely one gold medal. We ended that Games in 36th position, just behind Ethiopia and just ahead of Belarus. It wasn't just that Greece did better than us - Kazakhstan got four golds. If one were to take the Olympics as any kind of indicator of national health (and why should we not?) we would have to conclude that the past 12 years have been very well spent. And if Gordon Brown is to get it in the neck for every ill, real and imagined, why should he not get some credit for this?

Of course, I know it's not as simple as that, and I can acknowledge that the National Lottery, set up by John Major in 1994, is likely to have been a big factor in our changed sporting fortunes. But however we divide up the accolades (other than to the sporting men and women themselves), what seems clear, to me and to Boris Johnson, is that this success hardly points to our living in some kind of brutalised, boneless pre-dystopia.

[...]

If the “broken society” only means that there are places where there is too much poverty and crime, and that any death caused by a knife or a gun is a tragedy then, this side of Paradise, it means nothing. This is the peculiarly irritating aspect of the phrase. To take just one side of modern Britain with which I am familiar now that my drinking days are over, hundreds of thousands of Britons are involved, as participants or supporters, in scores of sporting events: marathons, half-marathons, ten-kilometre runs, bikeathons, triathlons, duathlons, from Orkney to the Isle of Wight. Some are athletes, some are motivated by charity, some - like me - are recovering lard-arses. Are they part of a broken society?

I was struck this week by Adam Sage's story in these pages about the French families who are sending their children to learn English by staying with British families in France. They speak English in the home and then go horse-riding in the safety of France. “I don't want to say bad things about Britain, but you do hear horror stories about children sent to stay with families there,” remarked one French teacher. But I would be prepared to bet that what really motivates such Gallic fearfulness is media coverage of the supposed brokenness of Britain.

Fine. How many times have we been told that there are two Olympic-size swimming pools in the whole of Britain and 29 (or something improbable) in Paris alone? So how come we came third in the swimming medals and the French came ninth? Are they 20 times as broken as we are?

The lizards may get their new government. If so it should begin its rule by admitting what its predecessors - the party of 2012 - got right."