Authors note,and 4 questions
Being without broadband for about 7 weeks and a telephone for a fortnight, has given me time to reassess the blog. Over a long period I have been unable to see my stats, but my Dutch friend, Jan, was able to tell me that my readership remained relatively stable in all that time. He suggested that schoolchildren were using my biography to help with their projects. In consequence I shall separate the biography as an entity, cut down on much of the comment, and just contribute, when I have something to say.
Four basic questions which affect us all.
Q1. Apart from war, can you think of any national requirement, that takes anything up to seven years to plan and put into effect, costs 20 billion pounds overall, or on average in Britain, £1000 per dwelling, and finally only takes three weeks to put into effect and complete?
Q2. Apart from sport, can you think of any other activity where those who are most successful are required to be tested for drugs?
Q3. While running two unsuccessful wars, probably having to go to obtain large loans from the International bank, bolstering failing banks, and with ever rising inflation, and a reducing standard of living, where is Britain going to find the money to pay for an extravaganza like this last Olympics.
Q4. Do we really like the way that the Olympic Games has developed and the effect it has had on our daily lives and the BBC’s policies.
It’s all really about money. I can remember when it was purely amateur, then sponsorship came along, followed closely by professionalism coupled to television broadcasts.. Do we need to have the equivalent of one whole, National, television channel taken up, not just with the athletics, but the hours of tedious chatter-patter padding, so that we see it as it happens? A good many of the heats are a bore, and esoteric events like shooting of interest to a very few. If you go through a list of all the events, I just wonder how many really interest you, or do you just switch channels. I haven’t the time to sit and listen again to some has-been reliving his or her past. How many of us will be able even to attend London and see the games? We are no longer the sporting nation we used to be, we don’t see children playing ball games in the park, only of a few schools now train for cross-country races, and while I used to have PT every day, go swimming every week, play sports twice a week as part of the school curriculum I suspect today, there is not so much swimming, or even sport as part of the school week
The opening sequence ofthe Chinese Olympics was incredible, The unbelievable, drilling, and a highly sophisticated electronic communicating system that must have gone into achieving such unbelievable unity in so many hundreds of people, all performing the same acts in total unison over an incredibly long time. The cost to those people by being trained for at least a whole year, in energy, and in their daily lives must have been immense. I assume they were soldiers.
To me the Olympics has become an ego trip for a small group of people, some at the head of sport, some who are politicians seeking approbation, and a high proportion of those involved are as much, if not more, interested in the financial returns as the sport. The Olympics, like professional football, is no longer a sport. Sport in my day was nowhere near as refined as it is today, it was a lot more casual, and to be honest, a lot more fun both for those partaking and the audience. I believe a lot of the fun has gone out of sport. Sport is clearly far more stressful for the participants now, and it includes considerably more cost to the fans. I just wonder how long it will be before the man in the street throughout the world will wake up to the fact that so muchof sport is just an ego trip for a very select few, at his unaffordable expense.