A gold medal for idiocy

The Olympics are a gigantic folly – and you still have time to be part of it

Would you like to compete for Britain at the 2012 Olympics? No, seriously, compete in the real Olympics, march in the athletes’ parade, wear our national colours? Vacancies are still available. Complete beginners most welcome — no experience necessary. You don’t even have to be, well, British. I promise I am not making this up.

Among the many inventive ways which London 2012 has devised to waste public money, Team GB Handball is my personal favourite. Three million pounds is being spent to create, from scratch, a British Olympic squad in a sport which virtually nobody in Britain has ever played. And in the Olympic Park, £44 million — enough for a new hospital wing — has gone on a 7,000-seat arena for handball, a sport whose entire British fan base could have been fitted into the nearest convenient school gym.