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FREEDOM FROM THE OLYMPIC GAMES

STOP THAT UNDYING, MONEY GUZZLING FLAME | APRIL 12th 2008

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Inspired by the latest controversy over the Beijing Olympics, Stephen Hugh-Jones has decided to damn the whole enterprise in general. The games are expensive, chauvinistic and over-hyped. Who needs them? ...

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The travails of the ludicrous Olympic flame have been well deserved. But not only for the reason given by most of the protesters. For them it has become almost a mantra to say "I'm not against the Games, just the government that is hosting them." Me, I'm against both.

Of Beijing's view of human rights, enough said. One could add that China is not the only country lording it over places that it shouldn't, and that for most Chinese people life today is a lot freer than under Mao Zedong. The self-styled Olympic "movement" and its games, in contrast, have gone from bad to worse in the past 30 years (with the connivance of flunky politicians): from conceit to sanctimonious arrogance, from overweight to elephantiasis.

Their driving force is money. Fair enough, but whose money? If private sector companies choose to sponsor the Olympics, that's up to them. But why on earth hurl public funds at these tarnished saturnalia? Have Greece (in 2004), China and Britain (in 2012) no better use for their citizens' cash than white-elephant sports stadiums and a hyperathletics trade fair?

In Britain, the 2005 estimate for 2012 was £2.4 billion ($4.8 billion) for the games themselves, and £1 billion for associated urban "regeneration". Or so we were told, not that those who peddled the figures believed them. By early last year, the figure for the games alone was £5.5 billion plus £2.8 billion for "contingencies". Let's guess £12 billion, say $25 billion, before the last bills are paid.

For what? Seventeen days of sport-cum-commerce; some arenas, whose later upkeep will cost tens of millions more; and enough police time to round up al Qaeda and the Mafia combined. Plus red carpets, limousines, dedicated road space, outriders and general puff and kowtowing (not least, a special law to protect the very word "Olympic") for the bunch of sports bureaucrats called the International Olympic Committee; a group with no more weight in the world (except for their budget) than the chairman of my parish council.

Why not just do the regeneration and forget the trade fair? You can do quite a lot with £12 billion.

Ah, but it's all in the name of sport. Or maybe I should write Sport, and kneel towards Olympia as I do so. I've nothing against sport: I was over 50 when I played my last game of cricket, and I still go to village matches, 22 blokes earning not a penny at it, just having fun. I happily watch televised football, though I'm not so happy when I read that its stars earn 50 times what a typical doctor does. But that's the market, so be it.

What sport isn't is a transcendental religion, as the Olympiarchs and other groupies imagine. I'm prepared to read that the Almighty has "granted" a blessing, or the Pope an audience, to some believer. But when the IOC announces it has "granted" its next jamboree to some city, much as 16th-century monarchs granted some noble the ruinous privilege of playing host to them, then I gag. When one sports journo gushes about the "profound beauty", nay and "truth", that he sees in the Olympics--"the greatest celebration of humanity", forsooth--my kindest thought is, yes, we've all read Keats.

Top-level sport is a money business. It's about winning and getting publicity contracts, sponsoring and increasing turnover, promoting and raking in the cash for the next promotion. No crime, but let's be honest about it. The Olympics add a heavy whiff of national chauvinism on top (and of corruption, and of other result-altering substances too, at least in the past). They can reduce normally rational statesmen to obsequious blancmange. But do they spread goodwill among nations? No. Or at least replace war, as their founder hoped? No. Do they leech public funds? Yes. At the expense of mass sport? In many countries, yes, though the IOC also sends some money back to that level. In four years they provide a few hours (or seconds) of competition for some world-class athletes, a fortnight's fun for televiewers, and four years of fat living and freebies for sports officials.

And this festival of cant and hype is "the purest event in sport" (I quote again)? Heaven help sport if that's true of the Olympics. The world would be better off without them.

(Stephen Hugh-Jones is a former writer and editor for The Economist, where he wrote the Johnson column from 1992-99. He lives now in West Sussex.)