There she was, four years later, a middle-aged woman sitting quietly on a crowded London bus last week, wearing the purple and scarlet shirt issued to the 70,000 volunteers – the Games makers, as they were called – at the 2012 Olympics. Not just the distinctive shirt, either, but the stuff that went with it, including the beige chinos and the grey trainers. Whatever she was doing – going to a reunion, perhaps – it provided a nostalgic jolt back to a time when Britain not only proved it could throw a party but seemed like a place of virtue.
Then last Sunday, during the BBC Imagine special on Danny Boyle’s opening ceremony, as the TV screen showed two union jack parachutes floating over the Olympic Stadium, it all came back again. The Queen and 007. “Good evening, Mr Bond.” “Good evening, Your Majesty.” And below them, 80,000 people in fits of disbelieving laughter at the most spectacular of Boyle’s many coups de théâtre. Kenneth Branagh and the “isle full of noises”. The live sheep and the village cricket match. The dark satanic chimneys. Suffragettes and Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Wiggo and the big gold bell, Mr Bean and the LSO. Petals of fire blooming from the 204 stems of the Olympic cauldron. Most unforgettably, JK Rowling and the Great Ormond Street staff reminding us of the place occupied by the NHS at the centre of our lives – although we learned from the programme that the then new health secretary, Jeremy Hunt, had tried to persuade Boyle to cut that sequence.
That night, and during the 16 days of competition that followed before the Spice Girls closed the show by roaring around the stadium perched on the top of London taxis, it all felt great. A friend of mine was a Games maker and had one of the best times of his life, but he identified a dissonance buried beneath the euphoria. “In a sense, it was volunteering for an organisation that takes hundreds of millions of pounds from broadcasting organisations,” he said this week. “I mean, would you volunteer for Amazon?”
Eventually other dissonances emerged, ranging from the relatively trivial – a legal action, settled out of court, alleging that the cauldron’s design had been plagiarised – to the great thundering lie employed to persuade a sceptical British public that the whole enterprise was worth the vast expense: the claim, endlessly repeated by Sebastian Coe and others, that hosting the Olympics would ensure a legacy of physical health for future generations.
So where are we now? With a plague of obesity, diabetes and other symptoms of ill health among young people, exacerbated by Michael Gove’s destruction of the School Sports Partnership. That vile decision deprived children at state schools of probably the most effective scheme devised to guarantee them physical exercise, with only the half-baked Schools Games and an unsatisfactory primary schools scheme offered in compensation. And now this week’s warning from Public Health England that a sharp rise in the level of vitamin D deficiency – the sunlight vitamin – among children has led to a resurgence in infant rickets, a condition associated with Victorian slums.
To watch the opening ceremony unfold all over again, and to listen to the recollections of the participants, was to be reminded that sport can indeed sometimes provide a good example to wider society. “We all felt so excited to be part of something so much bigger than us,” one volunteer performer said, remembering the secret rehearsals at a disused Ford plant in Dagenham. Another spoke of being tempted to withdraw, but changing her mind because it would mean letting people down. Those are the life-lessons sport can offer.
In terms of real legacy, however, it was all a gigantic waste of time and money. Less than a year ago, the Children’s Society reported on the high levels of unhappiness shown by English schoolchildren. In a survey of 53,000 children aged 10 to 12 in 15 countries, including Ethiopia, Germany, Israel, Estonia, Turkey, South Africa, Poland, and Algeria, English children came next to bottom in the happiness index, ahead only of South Korea. “We are one of the richest countries in the world and yet the happiness of our children is at rock bottom,” the charity’s chief executive said. “They are unhappy at school and are struggling with issues around their appearance and self-confidence.”
At around the same time, researchers at Essex University tested 300 children of similar age and discovered plummeting levels of physical fitness. “It has got to the stage now that if we took the least fit child from a class of 30 we tested in 1998, they would be one of the five fittest children in a class of the same age today,” Dr Gavin Sandercock, the lead researcher, said. “These are the children who had free swimming taken away, who lived through the demolition of the Schools Sports Partnerships and lost the five-hour offer of PE.”
These are issues that regular physical exercise – whether actual competitive sport or the “Indian dancing” derided by David Cameron while defending Gove’s axing of the SSP – could have addressed, had Coe’s pledge actually meant anything.
The mystery lies in the contrast between such dismal findings and the fact that we are living through a remarkable era for top-level British sport. In another Olympic year, just try making a list: Wimbledon champion Andy Murray, Formula One world champion Lewis Hamilton, Masters champion Danny Willett, world road racing champion Lizzie Armitstead, the three Tour de France jerseys – yellow, green and white – worn by Chris Froome, Mark Cavendish and Adam Yates on the same day this year, gold medals in the recent European athletics championships for Dina Asher-Smith, Martyn Rooney, Greg Rutherford, the men’s 4x100m and the women’s 4x400m relay teams, the two golds, three silvers and three bronzes won by Britain’s rowers in Poland at the last pre-Rio regatta, the England XV’s whitewashing of the Wallabies in Australia and Alastair Cook leading Test series wins against Australia, South Africa and Sri Lanka in the past 12 months. Oh, and Britain through to the semi-finals of the Davis Cup, defending their title – which would have seemed, not so long ago, about as likely as Pippa Middleton getting engaged to a person on the minimum wage.
It’s all wonderful. Just don’t try to tell me that spending £9bn on hosting the Olympics had anything to do with it. Thanks to Boyle and the British winners of 65 medals, we were left with memories of a golden summer. But that was as far as it went.
(Guardian service)
