This habitat will be destroyed with a network of
concrete bridges and a large part of the waterways will be culverted, making the
area much less sympathetic to wildlife. The Olympic stadium will rise to 50
metres and its shading effect on the surrounding land and waterways will be
significant.
As NOLondon2012 reports: "A new 'park' is
promised post Olympics, providing a greater amount of open space than now
exists. This park will not be created until 2020 (8 years after the games), and
meanwhile public amenity of the area will be lost. There are, as yet, no
financial arrangements for the management of a new park, and no organisation has
claimed they want to run it. By 2020, will anyone remember a park was promised?"
But it is vitally important to also recognise that
the ideology behind the Olympics is completely bankrupt, and of no benefit to
working people. At its most blatant, the Department of Culture, Media and Sport
has admitted that £340 million will be channelled from the existing sports
lottery distributors. So the Olympics will actually take money away from
participative sport provision for ordinary people, and channel it towards elite
professional athletes.
Already for the Beijing Olympics planned for 2008
UK Sport, the body that distributes funding under the World Class
performance Programme is spending £57.5 million supporting just 320 elite
competitors, plus a further £16 million to their sporting bodies. This Includes
£600000 to support one professional weightlifter; £5.3 million for the
equestrian team, £2 million for high diving, and over £1 million for the archery
team.
The aim of UK Sport is to increase Britain’s
Olympic medal tally. But note that the funding does not go towards sports where
there is mass participation or even spectator interest. It is focussed onto
activities where individuals can be groomed to produce maximum results. We will
have the appalling spectacle of a flag waving extravaganza of national
chauvinism, where the Queen and Prime Minister (Gordon Brown?) wrap themselves
in the Union Jack; and we are encouraged to have a vicarious identification with
elite athletes participating in sports that outside of the Olympic time none of
us take any interest in, just because through accident they carry the same
passport as us.
The sporting ideal represented by the Olympics was
described the French Marxist, Jean-Marie Brohm, as "physical torture put on
as entertainment … held up as politically neutral and culturally legitimate".
This is absolutely correct, and there is far too little critical examination of
the negative effect of competitive sport pushing the human body to the limits of
its physical capacity. For example the British marathon runner Paula Radcliife
has explained that her distinctive head rolling while running is a mechanism for
dealing with the debilitating pain she experiences. A French army instructor
recently expressed the philosophy brilliantly on TV, saying "pain is weakness
leaving the body"
It is instructive that the sports which exemplify
the Olympics are those based upon direct comparative measurement: for example,
athletics, swimming, weightlifting, cycling, skiing and boxing. The competition
is between those who can best sublimate their human individuality and transform
their body into a machine for producing the most efficient performance: the
transformation of human beings into abstract physical labour that can be
measured and compared. It is no coincidence that the origin of these alienated
sports where the element of play is entirely absent coincided with the emergence
of wage labour as the dominant relationship of production; a process which
removed play and enjoyment from the daily experience of productive labour.
Of course, the increased popularity of
weightlifting and aerobic exercise in gyms and fitness clubs is due not only to
an increasing cultural recognition of the benefits of exercise, but also because
the endorphin rush experienced when the body is pushed to the limits of its
physical strength or endurance is genuinely pleasurable. This is a legitimate
and (in moderation) a healthy and beneficial leisure activity
However, to compete at an international level
subverts the pleasure and benefit of moderate physical exercise and turns it
into a masochistic regime where human beings are subordinated to maximising the
outputs of their own bodies, even at the cost of their long term health or
mental well being. The Olympics - and even more so the Tour de France – are
dominated by performance enhancing drugs, and the effective collusion by the
sports’ governing bodies.
What is more, the training infrastructure and the
development of sports science is much more advanced in the developed economies
of the imperialist powers. So every four years the Olympics gives an opportunity
for the great powers to ideologically demonstrate that their world dominance is
underpinned by an implicit biological and racial superiority. This is one of the
impetuses behind the prestige of holding the games – an orgy of conspicuous
consumption that validates the host nation as a major power.
And alongside the sporting content there are huge
financial interests, in the construction of the stadiums - which will largely
lay empty and unused after the jamboree is over – in the construction of housing
and transport infrastructure; In advertising and sponsorship; in security and
administration; and of course in Television and broadcast rights. All of this
will be paid for, one way or another, by the working classes, through the
lottery – that tax on hope – through increased Council Tax, and through direct
taxation.
But the biggest defeat of London getting these
games is the reinforcing of the ideology of sport as being coincidental with a
classless, idealised national interest. And the more insidious acceptance of the
ideological construct of sport – a fully developed capitalist industry based
upon the competition of idealised people acting as machines.
A society based upon the primacy of meeting human
needs, and valuing the well balanced health and happiness of people may include
competitive play, but it will never award gold medals for those who submit to an
iron tyranny of the clock and the measuring tape as arbiters of human worth.