Why the Olympics Aren't Good for Us, and How They Can Be
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The London Olympics have been promoted as of great benefit for the host city and nation. The organisers insist that the lasting value of the facilities built, the tourism the Games will attract, and the popular participation in sport they will promote, all make the spending of billions of pounds of public money an excellent investment. Such claims have been greeted with near unanimous agreement across mainstream British politics and the media.
But outside the capital’s commentariat, enthusiasm for the Games has been less uniform. There are those who remain stubbornly sceptical of the boosters’ claims. Economists question whether the Olympics will provide the kind of economic regeneration London’s East End has been promised. Sports coaches doubt the linkage often made between Gold medal successes and raising rates of popular participation in sport. And the tourism industry has produced reports showing that previous host cities have experienced an overall fall in visitors and their spending during Olympic years.
In this concise, gripping book, Mark Perryman raises major questions about the founding myths of London 2012. But Perryman, an Olympics fanatic who measures his life in four-year cycles and has the sticker albums of medal-winners from his youth to prove it, hasn’t come to bury the Games; rather he wants to revive them. In these pages he sets out a detailed plan for how the Games can be made more inclusive and exciting to watch.
His proposals include: Extending the games from a single host city to an entire country, or even group of countries; using existing stadia with greater spectator capacity than many of the purpose built facilities; expanding competitions held outside of stadia altogether, with more road, cross-country and open water races; increasing the number of events based on sports like running and boxing where international participation is widespread, and reducing the number of those, such as rowing, fencing and equestrianism, where few countries have the facilities to compete; and shifting the onus of the games from corporate sponsorship to the involvement of community and volunteer groups.
In these ways, Perryman’s dream of reviving the Olympics as a genuinely popular event, a People’s Games, could be made a reality. Why The Olympics Aren’t Good For Us… is sure to prompt widespread debate during a summer when sport will be as impossible to miss as the muscular commerce and timid politics serving it up.
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Why the Olympics Aren't Good for Us, and How They Can Be - Mark Perryman
© 2012 Mark Perryman
Published by OR Books, London and New York.
OR Books is a new type of publishing company that embraces progressive change in politics, culture and the business of publishing. We sell our books worldwide, direct to readers. To avoid the waste of unsold copies, we produce our books only when they are wanted, either through print-on-demand or as platform-agnostic e-books. Our approach jettisons the inefficiencies of conventional publishing to better serve readers, writers and the environment. If you would like to find out more about OR Books please visit our website at www.orbooks.com.
First printing 2012.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher, except brief passages for review purposes.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data:
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress
British Library Cataloging in Publication Data:
A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978-1-935928-83-6 paperback
ISBN 978-1-935928-84-3 e-book
Typeset by Wordstop, Chennai, India.
Printed by BookMobile in the US and CPI Books Ltd in the UK.
The US printed edition of this book comes on Forest Stewardship Council-certified, 30% recycled paper. The printer, BookMobile, is 100% wind-powered.
For Edgar, with the hope there will be better Olympics to come
Contents
INTRODUCTION
Ever Fallen in Love With
CHAPTER 1
How the Games Are Political
CHAPTER 2
The Promise of London 2012 and Why It Won’t Be Kept
CHAPTER 3
Five New Olympic Rings
CHAPTER 4
Reimagining Olympism
AFTERWORD
Not Just Running for Gold
FURTHER READING AND RESOURCES
Going the Extra Mile
Acknowledgements
Garry Whannel’s Blowing the Whistle and Alan Tomlinson’s Five Ring Circus, co-edited with Garry, first convinced me as an aspiring Gramscian that sport was something I could not only watch and do with a degree of political legitimacy, but write about too. I am most grateful to you both for your inspiration and to Alan for your continuing support.
Alan and his co-editor John Sugden must also both be thanked for pestering me to write a chapter for their book Watching the Olympics. I was in South Africa for World Cup 2010, looking forward to writing a book on England’s trophy-winning campaign. In the event I had plenty of spare time to write their chapter instead, and this more than anything convinced me to write a book of my own on the Olympics. Thanks.
It was after reading Garry’s and Alan’s books that I wrote my first article on the politics of sport, on the jogging boom and the London Marathon, for Marxism Today. Martin Jacques was the kind of editor to take a risk with an unproven writer and subject. Many thanks Martin. More recently thanks to Philip Oltermann on Comment is Free at the Guardian, Comment Editor on The Times Anne Spackman, Greg Leedham on the Morning Star sports desk, Jonathan Rutherford of the journal Soundings, Andy Newman at www.socialistunity.com and Mel Gomes of the blog The Substantive for providing me with the space to write on various sporting themes over the recent period, articles that have helped me formulate some of the ideas which now appear in this book.
Students on the Sport and Leisure Management, Sport Studies and Sport Journalism degrees at the University of Brighton have listened with sufficient interest to my lectures on the Olympics to convince me I have something worthwhile to say. Tim Vyner, Rupert Bassett and the final year Graphic Comunication class at Bath Spa University also provided an audience for my ideas on reforming Olympism. The fact you laughed at my jokes gave me further encouragement to write.
George Galloway, Kevin Ovenden, Rob Hoveman and Tower Hamlets’ Respect Party gathered an impressive crowd of local activists in the basement of George’s then-constituency office to listen to my impassioned argument that the Olympics that would take place on the edge of their borough mattered politically. The enthusiastic response to my presentation was another further factor in my deciding to write. Thanks again.
Brighton University students Ollie Miller and Tom Glenn carried out research projects under my supervision on race and the local impact of the Olympics, which also featured at this evening in Tower Hamlets. Your youthful appetite for the investigation, even though you might not have known it at the time, would inspire me to find the energy and commitment to write myself.
Thanks to Colin Robinson of OR Books, with whom I expected to discuss the dual crisis of global capitalism and Liverpool FC, but who ended up convincing me I could write a book on the Olympics in an unfeasibly short time. Colin and his colleague Alex Nunns have provided invaluable editing advice, which has turned this book into something immeasurably better than the one I would have written without their help.
Various earlier versions of this book never went much beyond the planning stage. For showing enough faith in the idea to persuade me to eventually write a book I am grateful to Tariq Goddard of Zero Books, Sally Davison of Lawrence & Wishart and Neal Lawson of the campaign group Compass. Sorry I couldn't deliver for any of you but I hope you nevertheless like what I’ve ended up writing.
The business I co-founded, Philosophy Football, apart from selling more than a few T-shirts, continues to provide all sorts of ideas of how sport could be reorganized on an ethical and democratic basis. An invaluable experience. Thanks to my co-founder Hugh Tisdale for being generous enough to allow me the time to write alongside my responsibilities to the company.
My main involvement in sport over the past sixteen years has been via the LondonEnglandFans group and the fan-friendly activities we are part of organizing wherever the England football team play abroad. Being involved in a fan-led movement that is both proudly for England and at the same time immersed in the popular internationalism that a Euro or World Cup campaign at its best is has taught me plenty about the potential of sport to unite, as well as divide.
My partner Anne has lived with this book’s sometimes painful evolution from idea to research, via writer’s block, loss of faith in the project and eventual acceleration to completion. Thanks for the enduring patience. Our three-year-old son Edgar meanwhile has, through his swimming lessons, hurtling around the skateboard park on his scooter, and kicking of a football with wild abandon, successfully warded off any loss of faith in sport’s ability to give endless pleasure and sometimes pain.
Finally, thanks to a place, not a person or persons. The South Downs, just above the village of Kingston in East Sussex. A devilishly steep climb to run up, with wild ponies grazing at the side of the stony track. Running along the ridge as I completed this book has convinced me that whatever the corporations, bureaucrats and politicians might do to ruin our enjoyment of London 2012, the simple appeal of sport can never be extinguished. For that I will always be grateful even if any dreams of winning a medal, of any description, are now long gone.
INTRODUCTION
Ever Fallen in Love With
–something you shouldn’t have fallen in love with, to misquote the late 1970s punk band The Buzzcocks. This is not an anti-Olympics book, nor is it against sport. Rather it is about the process that has changed the Olympics into what they have become: a Games that is commercialized and commodified and built on promises that are almost never fulfilled to aid regeneration, boost participation in sport and leave a legacy of well-used facilities. This is not a process that is irreversible and if the Games were organized on a different basis, which I outline, many of those broken promises could instead be kept.
Why the Olympics Aren’t Good for Us concentrates mainly on the Summer Olympics (rather than the Winter Games or the Paralympics) since Los Angeles 1984. That’s not because the Games before them don’t matter. They do. The best book I read in the course of researching this one was Rome 1960: The Olympics That Changed the World, by David Maraniss, about an Olympics caught in the midst of the Cold War and the rising civil rights movement led by Martin Luther King Jr. in the USA.