Browse > Home / Life In The UK / The Bid For The London 2012 Olympics Was A Con. The Games Should Be Scrapped

The Bid For The London 2012 Olympics Was A Con. The Games Should Be Scrapped

December 7, 2008

Olympics LogoThomas Mathew writes: We, at StirringTrouble, have long been promoting the idea of scrapping the London 2012 summer Olympic Games, simply because Britain can’t afford to stage a competition equal in its razzmatazz and level of organisation to the Chinese 2008 Games.

It was total madness right from the start to decide to host this disaster and even spend a huge amount of money on winning the right to stage the Olympics. According to some people we spoke to, the British National Olympic Committee (NOC) had blown £100 million on the campaign to persuade the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to choose London as the stage for the 2012 Games.

Just because some developers wanted to make money on the construction of the Olympic sites and some politicians, including the then Prime Minister, Tony Blair, wanted to go down in history as the people who got the Games for London there was absolutely no point in pushing the bid too hard. London should have lost to Paris and enjoyed watching the French suffer as their bills would have piled up.

Imagine what would have happened if Paris would have won the right to host 2012 summer Olympics. We would all be gloating now and discussing how the ‘frogs’ would fail spectacularly and would not be able to meet the deadlines for finishing constructing of the sites for the Games. ‘We told you so,’ the Brits would be saying while quietly thanking the British NOC for failing to clinch the Games.

The whole thing was a con right from the start. Especially as it has now become known that even before the bidding Blair and his cronies from the cabinet had been presented with a 250-page strategy document that confirmed that the Games would bring little economic or social benefit to the nation. The main benefit that was mentioned in the document was the possibility of cheering the nation up. At the time of the bidding the Olympic project was supposed to cost around £2.5 billion. Now the total bill stands at £9.3 billion and, considering the rate of inflation and the overall downturn in the economy, the amount is bound to reach £20 billion by 2012. Roughly the amount, by the way, that the wars in Iraq an Afghanistan will have cost the British taxpayers by then. So that would mean that the total bill for the Games – both in terms of sport and in terms of war – would cost Britain £40 billion and upwards.

It is interesting that the government, having received the conclusions of the experts in 2002, quietly buried the report and instead launched a PR campaign to convince everyone that hoisting the Olympics was a great idea and that the whole country would benefit immensely from the Games. There was even a suggestion put through that the staging of the Games would help to regenerate East London and, what was absolutely absurd, attract more youngsters into sports.

Labour then was sounding just like a communist regime, bent on staging an expensive brainwashing exercise for the masses. The obsession with spin of Blair and his clique resulted in the burdening of the nation with a huge bill for an event that no one really needs. That would be some legacy for Blair and that other creep, Ken Livingstone.

Olympics have become an anachronism. They are now mostly used by corporate interests for advertising purposes. Tourists with nothing else to do and fans of obscure sports – usually very sad people with no life – descend on a city and pretend for two weeks that they are interested in watching somebody throw a discus further than the rest or seeing swimmers popping out of the water in a synchronised fashion. Or cheering on a shooter firing from an air gun at a target that no one can see anyway, including the shooter himself.

Meanwhile crime would go up in London during the Olympics, as it usually does in host-cities. Drugs would be available everywhere, the black market in counterfeit souvenirs would flourish, vandalism of old buildings and monuments would be widespread and prostitutes would fight for customers between each other on the streets and in hotels lobbies. Not to mention that sexually transmitted deceases and all sorts of exotic viruses would spread like bush fire, as it usually happens during summer Olympics.

And how about the forthcoming doping scandals? Once again athletes would be caught using banned substances and everyone would say that these are just isolated incidents. Isolated they will be, but only in the sense that only some dope users would be caught while the majority, who’d be using some new untraceable substances, would go on to win medals and break world records. Who on earth still thinks that doping is limited to a minority of athletes? It is as widespread in sport as cocaine use in the City of London or in Kingstown, Jamaica.

There is no point in continuing this charade with pretending that Britain needs the Olympics of 2012. Let the Chinese host them again or let the Greeks take them and keep them to themselves. They have invented them in the first place so why should we all suffer?


Related posts:

  1. My Advice To London’s Mayor Boris Johnson: Pull The Plug On 2012 Olympics

    Now that everyone in Britain apart from Lord Coe accepts that it would not be a great idea to host the summer Olympic Games...

  2. Back To The Future: A Glimpse Of Things To Come In 2012

    I am sorry, but I would like to remind the people of Britain, and of London, how vulgar and over the top the closing...

  3. Olympic Games In China Should Be Boycotted. And The Ones In Russia Cancelled.

    Events in Tibet are a stark reminder that the Chinese communist regime is prepared to go to any lengths to cling to power. They will...

  4. A Tale Of Two Tsars. And Of Hosting The Winter Olympic Games In Sub-Tropics

    Anton Goryunov reports from Moscow: ‘We were born to turn fairy tales into reality…’ These were the words from an uplifting Soviet song from...

  5. Of Games That Some Nations Play. Military Games, That Is

    Martin McCauley writes: You’ll never guess who is providing the main military muscle to Pakistan. Go on, have a guess. Is it the United...

Category: Life In The UK  · 1 Comment »
Tags: ,

One Response to “The Bid For The London 2012 Olympics Was A Con. The Games Should Be Scrapped”

  1. Lynsey Rogers on December 9th, 2008 2:42 pm

    I wholeheartedly agree with you. The UK population is by and large uninterested in the Olympic Games, wherever they are held. There is mild excitement if we win a few medals, but nobody really cares. London is busy enough already, I don’t want to imagine the gridlock in 2012.
    In the current economic climate this waste of money could be put to far better use than expensive fireworks. However the government has a tradition of expensive useless projects to keep up, look at the Millenium Dome! What a money pit that was!
    How they can spend such vast amounts of money while thousands of British people are losing their jobs at Christmas time is beyond me. It is all about keeping up appearances, and brushing real issues under the carpet. Another Great British tradition.

Would you like to add a comment?