Wings Over Scotland

There seems to be a disconnect for many Scots between how they feel about the London Olympics and how they’ll act when the Games are on. Many will bemoan the cost, lost opportunities, lack of access or significant national legacy, but will simultaneously be cheering on the athletes in Team GB. Is it a form of Olympic schizophrenia that we should despise the Games and yet love them at the same time?

Schizophrenia isn’t, of course, really the correct term to use for this phenomenon. It’s a mental disorder characterised by a breakdown of thought processes and by poor emotional responsiveness. Despite the etymology of the term from the Greek roots, schizophrenia does not imply a “split mind” and it is not the same as Dissociative Identity Disorder – also known as “multiple personality disorder” or “split personality” – despite often being confused with it in the public’s perception.

So perhaps it’s more accurate to say that myself, and many others, suffer from a form of Olympic split personality disorder. But what is it that causes this affliction? In order to find out, we need to look at the history of London 2012.

The lengths London went to in order to secure the Games were mindboggling, with even the capital’s traffic light system being hacked by the event organisers so that visiting IOC panel members wouldn’t get a bad impression of traffic congestion in the city. When the bid succeeded back in 2005, few would have thought that the end result would be such a burden on public finances, yet to put on the sort of Olympic political showcase that the government wanted the costs were always going to go only one direction.

Needless to say it didn’t start well, with the logo causing the first controversy. It was designed by Wolff Olins, a consultancy in Camden, London that bills itself as a specialist in developing brand experiences, creatively-led business strategies, and visual identity systems. The logo cost a staggering £400,000 and was referred to by design guru Stephen Bayley as “a puerile mess, an artistic flop and a commercial scandal”. To compound this, the launch of the logo in an animated advert resulted in a segment of the promotional footage triggering seizures in a small number of people, prompting it to be removed.

It didn’t get much better when the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic mascots Wenlock and Mandeville were unveiled either, supposedly fashioned from droplets of the steel used to build the Olympic stadium. Even these cuddly toys have been mired in controversy after it emerged that they were being manufactured in Chinese sweatshops, with all the possible child labour issues that accompany such operations, and employees earning just £0.18 per toy despite them selling in the UK for more than £20. The workers are hunched in rows over sewing machines, getting only £93 for 358 hours work a month in dirty, crowded factories, without a single day off. They’re forced to work for up to 11½ hours a day and can be fined a full day’s pay if they leave their workplace untidy.

This probably wasn’t what the Olympic committee had in mind when they said they wanted the Games to make people more active, but they’ve assured the public that the IOC cares deeply about ethics and that any issues will be looked into properly saying “We place a high priority on environmental, social and ethical issues.” 

When one of the stated goals of the Olympics is to get children active and healthy, it also doesn’t help that some of the main sponsors are fast food retailers, such as McDonalds and Coke. They’ve even built the world’s largest McDonalds to accommodate demand in the Olympic Village. Aware of the potential PR downside of encouraging healthy living while feeding children high fat, high salt, high sugar foods, McDonalds has included a pedometer in the shape of mascot’s Wenlock and Mandeville in its Happy Meals. It’s unlikely that any short-lived infatuation with a novelty item will counter the longer-term effects on health caused by the promotion of such diets to the country’s future athletes.

What about the Olympics’ environmental credentials? It was originally planned to provide 20% of the energy for the Olympic Park and Village from renewable technologies, but this is now more likely to be as little as 9% – proposals to meet the original target were scrapped by the Coalition government, citing safety reasons. The organisers of the event say that all waste products will be recyclable, or at the very least biodegradable, but the sheer scale of the event in numbers of visitors, air travel, local congestion and resources required to undertake the project mean that the Olympics were never going to have a positive impact on the environment.

This fact was underlined by the acceptance of sponsorship from the Dow Chemical Company (owner of Union Carbide), which seems to be at odds with both the environmental aim (given the fundamental nature of the chemical industry), and also the social aspect, after a gas leak at the company’s plant in Bhopal in 1984 killed 2259 people. The company has never fully accepted responsibility or paid adequate compensation for the deaths or the generations of terrible side effects, but it’s had no trouble getting its chequebook out for the Games.

The promotion of the Games hasn’t endeared itself to the wider UK community outside of London either, typified by the ham-fisted attempts to bolt giant Olympic rings onto Edinburgh Castle. Exactly why the city would want to use one of its main attractions as an advertising hoarding to try to tempt people to travel to the other side of the UK during the Edinburgh Festival – the Scottish capital’s peak tourist season – was never really explained.

The issue isn’t restricted to Edinburgh, with the Welsh tourist industry arguing that in the short term the Olympics actually displaces the normal tourism trade, with regular tourists turned off from visiting regions hosting the Games. From the outset, the Olympics never seemed like a project that would benefit the whole of the UK. As for London itself, not only will the influx of visitors choke the city’s transport infrastructure to within an inch of gridlock, the ever-spiralling security apparatus and the accompanying intrusion into the civil liberties of the public are likely to prove highly detrimental to the lives of ordinary citizens.

The financial aspects, too, make for sobering contemplation. An investigation into the Games by Sky News identified as much spending as they could that was associated with the Olympics:

“When London bid for the Games seven years ago the predicted cost of staging the Olympics and Paralympics was put at £2.37bn. The original public sector funding package, which is primarily cash to build the venues and provide security and policing, was increased in 2007 to about £9.3bn following a review. However Sky has counted an extra £2.4bn on top of the current £9.3bn public sector funding package for the Games. The additional cash includes spends on more anti-doping control officers, money for local councils for their Olympic torch relay programmes, cash spent on legacy schemes, paying tube workers not to strike, governmental operational costs, the cost of the Olympic Park Legacy Company, legal bills over the stadium tenancy decision and extra pounds to UK Sport. The figures also take into account the cost of buying the land for the venues at £766m.

“The £12bn cost of the Olympics, calculated by Sky, does not include extra counter-terrorism funding of £1.131bn being allocated to the police despite a ministerial statement saying ‘much of this capacity will be devoted to the Olympics in 2012’. Nor does it include the £4.4bn budgets of the security and intelligence services. It also does not take into account the opportunity cost of having the majority of the UK police force working on the Games instead of fighting crime elsewhere. On peak days 12,000 officers will be policing the Games.

“In addition, Sky’s overall total misses out the £6.5bn spent on transport upgrades which have been brought forward due to the Olympics and could have been cancelled as part of Government spending cuts were it not for the event.

“If these figures had been counted, the Olympic spend would have totalled well over £24bn – more than double the current budget and 10 times the original calculation.”

In true British establishment style, the actual final cost of the Games is a closely guarded secret, and inventive accounting is used to deceive the public into believing that the true sum is lower than it really is. Such tactics include not counting the £766 million cost of purchasing the land for the event, as according to a spokesperson for the Department for Culture, Media and Sport “The cost of buying the land was excluded because the public purse would be reimbursed by selling it off after the Games”. Yet since the land was bought we’ve had a recession and the value of the land has reduced, not all plots will be able to be sold on, and the UK has a history selling public assets cheaply to “preferred bidders” that just happen to be financial backers of the government of the day, making it highly unlikely the full amount will be recouped.

The Public Accounts Committee has voiced its concerns over the legacy of the Games in both sporting-participation terms and financial ones, highlighting the uncertain future of the Olympic Stadium after a deal for West Ham United FC to take it over after the Games was scrapped. In Greece, the legacy of the Athens 2004 Games is one of of unused stadiums that are slowly rusting. Many Greeks, like Dimitris Dimitriou, a bank worker who was 28 when Athens opened the Olympics, believe that:

“They’ve let the whole place go to pot. The main stadium is a bit better off because it’s used by football teams but, if you look around, everything is rotting and rusting. The toilets are filthy, the showers stink and there’s no hot water. I don’t think anything here has been cleaned for years. And, to think, we are still paying for all this. Its part of the reason why our country is broke. And I hate the thought but he will be paying for it, too”, pointing to his son.

With regard to the participatory legacy, meanwhile, the PAC said:

“We were promised a strong Olympic legacy but the government has chosen not to adopt the target of one million more people participating in sport by 2013 and plans for the stadium have fallen through. It must not become a white elephant… The government is dispersing responsibility for delivering the legacy and we need clarity about who is accountable… It is unclear what the sporting participation legacy of the Games is intended to be”

The previous Labour government diverted an extra £425m from the Big Lottery Fund to finance the Games back in 2007. This was in addition to the original £213m already taken from the Fund, and came out of money intended to provide sporting and social facilities to some of the poorest communities in the UK. At the time assurances were made that the money would be refunded from sales of Olympic assets, but campaigners for the voluntary sector are still waiting five years on to hear if the coalition government will honour that commitment.

This lack of support to communities in need is even more galling when you consider the large sums of money that has been spent on facilities and items that are not in fact associated with the Games physically. The £335,000 Olympic sculpture by Richard Harris called Jurassic Stones, for example, is designed to welcome motorists entering the sailing events in Weymouth, Dorset. People might legitimately wonder whether it was necessary to the successful functioning of the Games that spectators specifically attending by car should be greeted in such an expensive fashion.

The greatest of these art distractions, though, is the Arcelor Mittal Orbit observation tower. At £22.7 million to build it’s one of the most expensive sculptures in the UK’s history, and situated only a stone’s throw from the Olympic Stadium. This investment, however, does not secure access for the taxpayer. Entry fees to the sculpture will be £15 for adults and £7 for children and pensioners – a family of four will have to add £44 to the cost of their day out if they want to ascend the tower, which offers panoramic views over the Park and the London skyline.

Even then, entry will be restricted during the Games to those with tickets to watch sporting events – which cost as much as £2,012 for the most expensive seat at the opening ceremony. (This is on top of the decision to charge for events that were originally meant to be free.) Olympic officials said the general public would not be able to visit the tower until Easter 2014, after a further £490 million, two-year redevelopment project to make the area “more urban”. This sum is another one not included in the figures for the cost of the Games.

But even the Mittal tower is dwarfed in scope by the Westfield shopping mall. Now, readers might well ask what a shopping mall has to do with the Olympics. The answer is that the vast commercial development is the “gateway to the Games”, through which spectators will be forcibly channelled on their way to the sporting venues. £200 million was removed from Olympic funding to pay for the roads and utilities to the centre.

The Olympics are categorised as a “UK spend” project, which means that no Barnett consequentials accrue to the other home nations. Essentially, it means that Scotland’s £114 million contribution of lottery money, which was previously earmarked for sports and social projects in Scotland, was entirely swallowed up paying for roads and utilities of a privately-owned shopping mall in London. Margo MacDonald said:

“We lost millions that would have gone into the development of community sport which is about training coaches, improving grounds, paying for clubs and for kids to go for athletic meets or swimming matches and so on. For the same kids who may well have lost out on improvements to the premises of their club hall where they do their own sport, it is unlikely they will be going to Games with their parents, as it is exorbitantly expensive.”

Given all the above, it should come as no shock that many like me find the whole Olympic project an increasingly off-putting one. Yet curiously, we’re still excited by the Games themselves. Is this, as discussed earlier, a form of split personality?

I’m more inspired by the reaction of our younger generation to the Games than the actions of the event organisers. The local education establishment in Linlithgow, for example, decided to get children involved in supporting the Olympics through a project they called the Lin’Olympics. The project saw youngsters immerse themselves in the cultures of their adopted countries, and take part in athletic games events to celebrate sport.

What was surprising however, was the reaction of the London 2012 organisers. When the news that hundreds of Linlithgow children planned to hold their own Olympic event reached LOCOG, they responded to this positive encouragement of sporting achievement by saying that organisers had to drop the Lin’Olympics title because of fears it would undermine the official “brand”.

The games were granted the London 2012 Inspire Mark, which allowed organisers to link it to this summer’s Games, but on agreeing this the schools had to alter the title of the event to “The Linlithgow Games” to conform to the Inspire programme’s branding guidelines or be in breach of terms. It seems like LOCOG place “inspiring children to participate in sport” somewhat lower down its list of priorities than protecting its brand and revenues.

In ancient Roman religion and mythology, Janus was the two faced god of beginnings and transitions, looking to the future and the past, leading to use of the term ‘Janus faced’, which has the following dictionary definition: “marked by deliberate deceptiveness especially by pretending one set of feelings and acting under the influence of another”. If the Olympics are to have a mythological icon, Janus is a far more apt one that any of the Greek gods more commonly associated with the Games.

On one hand we have the Games themselves; good, honest (drug tests permitting) open competition, in which we will cheer on athletes from any country as we watch them achieve incredible feats of speed, strength and endurance. In stark contrast, we have the political and corporate moneymaking machine described above, a machine that offers politicians the chance to enhance their egos at the expense of the public purse and for vested interests to cream off billions in public funds.

I invite you all to join me in being pro- AND anti-Olympics. Know that you are not alone in supporting and hating the Games simultaneously – it’s not you that’s in the wrong, and it’s not Olympic schizophrenia but rather the Janus face of the Olympics that is to blame. Enjoy the games for the achievements, and chastise the politicians and corporations for reducing those achievements by their actions. It’s the only way to make it through the summer.