“For £9.2 billion you could’ve written ‘F*** Off Germany’ onto the moon”

Not for a long time have I been as utterly uninterested in something as I am in the prospect of London 2012. To briefly contextualise this , and show just how much apathy I currently hold, I’ve compiled a short list of things currently higher in my interest levels than the Olympics:

1) The intricate tactics of lawn bowls

2) Alan Shearer’s appearances on Match of the Day

3) The ongoing SU elections

4) Domestic Welsh Football

This is how dark things have become. All around me I see people excitedly waxing lyrical about attending the Greco-Roman Freestyle wrestling or some other similarly banal event, and I find myself simply saying time after time “Who cares?”

No other sporting event has divided public opinion like the Olympics has. We can almost notice the split geographically: for many Londoners, the Olympics is a godsend, for everyone else, a sense of nonplussed resentment rules. A quick survey around my kitchen confirms this. On a scale of 1-5, with 5 representing very excited, and 1 not even remotely excited, myself from Manchester registered a 1, friends from Birmingham and Wales a 2, and two friends from London, unsurprisingly a 4 and a 5. The problem isn’t that the Olympics is being hosted in London, the problem is the complete charade of it being an exhibition of ‘Britishness’. People would appreciate it more if the people running it acknowledged it is a London-centric event and so staged it accordingly, instead of maintaining that it is an opportunity for all areas of Britain to see, supposedly, the greatest sporting event on the planet. I’m not even convinced that Londoners generally are actually excited to see the events, it is simply that they recognise the good it will do for their city, a good that is not matched in places that arguably need help as much as, if not more than London.

As a proud Mancunian, the only event to visit one the best sporting cities in Europe at the moment is football, an entirely counter-productive idea. Something tells me that after an exhilarating year of Premier league football, dominated by City and United, and showcasing some of the finest footballers in the world, the people of Manchester aren’t going to be quite as excited to see the footballing powerhouses of Belarus and Gabon (under 23s of course) locking horns (and yes, those are two of the 16 teams competing).

The benefits to London, and London alone, will be great, yet this is not equated in how the Games are funded. 23% of the money needed to host the Olympics has come from the National Lottery, as the name implies, a country-wide institution. Hence, people who will not get to see the Olympics live, alongside people, like myself who just aren’t particularly interested still end up spending their hard earned money to effectively fund an urban renewal, with no personal gain whatsoever. The issue of money and expenditure is problematic on a wider scale as well. People will attempt to justify the £9 billion costs with talk of the renewal and redevelopment of certain areas of London, but realistically, at a time of economic austerity, so much more could have been done with that money on a larger, nationwide scale. The logo alone cost £400,000, yet could have easily been produced in any day care centre around the nation by handing a 4 year old a felt tip and a ruler.

There is a serious discrepancy between the ‘best of British’ rhetoric that has been spouted ever since the decision to give London the Olympics was made on July 6th 2005, and the actuality of the event, incredibly centralised in London. We need look only to David Beckham, “This is going to do so much for our country, not just obviously the East End in London,” and Gary Lineker, “The Games will inspire the nation and give us the ability to showcase all that is great about Britain.” Yet 3 years later, in the closing ceremony of the 2008 Beijing Olympics, what did we see? Not an exhibition of Britain as a whole, merely a sequence of images wholly related to the city of London, featuring a score entitled, “This is London” and recorded by the London Symphony Orchestra.

So now we come to the big question: come July 27th, what will you be doing? For me it’s an easy one; I’ll be partaking in the annual Finnish tradition of ‘Sleepy Head Day’ and at all costs avoiding the single most over-rated, over-hyped and tedious event in world sport.