Time And Tide

0 Comments | Evening Standard; London (UK), Jul 28, 2010 | by Andrew Neather

IT’S two years until the Olympics, and there are fresh worries about the Games’s much-vaunted legacy of a fitter, sportier nation. Sports minister Hugh Robertson yesterday denied that massive cuts at his department meant damage to the legacy, instead promising a new drive by, er, merging the Sport England and UK Sport quangos. Meanwhile, this paper reported that few grants have yet been made from the Mayor’s Pounds 15.5 million sports legacy fund, more than a year after it was set up.

So look, can we just get over this sports legacy twaddle? Personally I think the Olympics are a colossal waste of money, but now that we’ve committed to spending Pounds 9.3 billion on them and have built half the stadia, can we just get on with what the Games are actually about: the world’s greatest sporting festival? Despite years of official exhortation, our participation in sport has been more or less static over the past decade. Three weeks of Olympic sports that few people normally watch, let alone play, aren’t going to make much difference to that
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