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The Olympics are All About Money
Mihir Bose
Forget the Corinthian Spirit, The Olympics are All About Money
Gold goes to the sponsors: Mihir Bose describes how the Corinthian spirit of the Olympic Games has given way to a McDonalds-style franchise
This summer's London Olympics will see much talk of how the Games are the last bastion of the Corthinian spirit in sports: athletes competing for honour not money and living communally in a specially built village. Just before the Games begin, Jacques Rogge, President of the International Olympic Committee, will, as he always does, leave his Park Lane Hotel and move to the Olympic Village. To emphasise this Corthinian ethos, no advertisements will be allowed at the Olympic venues.
But any idea that this will make 2012 like the 1948 London Games, at which Horlicks was sipped as athletes cheerfully put up with post-war austerity, will be an illusion. In reality, 2012 will be a tightly controlled franchise with strictly policed rules, a final destination on the road travelled by modern sporting events since commercialism made its pitch invasion in the mid-80s. So London's organisers have been told to deliver a 'clean city'. This means ensuring all billboards advertising products which rival those of Olympic sponsors are removed. Sponsors provide the money, their rights need protecting.
The IOC can impose these rules because in the past 20 years politicians have been convinced of the value of sports. In 1987, when Mrs Thatcher appointed Colin Moynihan as her Sports Minister, she revealed that she was immune to the attractions of sport. As he left No 10, she told him: 'For some extraordinary reason, the press are fascinated by sport. It's likely your appointment will lead on the Six O'clock News. Please keep it quiet until then.'
Her successors are all too eager to be associated with sport. So in the spring of 2011 Barrack Obama, making his first state visit to Britain, played table tennis with David Cameron against schoolboys in London. British papers analysed their ability and playing styles as indicators of their performance in office.
Britain is spending 9.3 billion pounds to host the 2012 Games. One argument in favour of this is that the Games have ensured the development of the East End. Tessa Jowell, Secretary for Culture, Media and Sport under Tony Blair, also saw it as elevating the nation's status and used it to persuade him to back Britain's Olympic bid. As they sat in the Downing Street garden she told him that it would be a great shame if the fourth largest economy - as Britain then was - could not even bid for the greatest show on earth. Blair was so taken that, although the vote in Singapore in June 2005 was on the eve of a G8 summit that he was hosting, he squeezed in a visit there to help London defeat the favourite Paris.
Britain is clearly distinct from the countries that have recently won the right to host the Games or World Cup since 2008. Most belong to the so-called BRICS group of rising economic powers - Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa - and have something to prove to the world.
In many ways the most revealing political wooing was that by Nelson Mandela to secure South Africa the 2010 World Cup. I was made vividly aware of this on May 14, 2004, a day before the Fifa executive met to vote on the bid. In Zurich's Grand Dolder Hotel in the hills above the Fifa HQ, I saw Mandela and Thabo Mbeki, then President of South Africa, emerge from their suite with Jack Warner, a Fifa vice-president. Warner controlled three votes on the 24-man executive and could swing the election.
What these three discussed has never been revealed but the next day South Africa won and at the celebratory lunch Mandela duly raised a glass to his new friend.
Mandela knew that Fifa would behave as if it was a Vatican of sport. In South Africa, Fifa even forced through a law change so that football-related offences were brought to court within weeks. This in a country where it take years for a normal case to come to court. Mandela was willing to pay that price to show that his rainbow nation could host the World Cup.
Back in 2002, then at The Daily Telegraph, I launched the campaign for London to bid for the 2012 Games. The reason I was in favour was at that stage this country had, unlike the French, been wretched on big projects - witness the Dome or Wembley - and I felt it was time to prove we could do better.
However, it was after the victory that too little was done to explain what hosting the Olympics meant. Unlike Rio, Britain did not need the Olympics to announce its arrival as a nation. What was also not explained was that the Olympics meant regeneration of the East End and this would be costly, pushing the budget up from 2.34 billion pounds to 9.3 billion pounds. When I revealed this, many involved in running the Olympics were unhappy. What is still being skated over is that the control exercised by the IOC means these Games are far removed from the Corthinian principles that inspired the original Olympics.
(Mihir Bose is the author of The Spirit of the Game, How Sport Made the Modern World.)
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