Like a good many of you, I imagine, I was worried that hosting the 2012 Olympic Games in London might send out the wrong sort of message, especially to our young people. The games have traditionally been an appallingly elitist and singularly competitive tournament of a somewhat exclusive nature. Certain people, unfairly selected on the shallow basis of their physical prowess, run, jump and throw things and the people who do best are rewarded while those who do poorly are labelled failures. This is regrettably true even of the more recent Paralympic Games, where the noble aspiration of making crippled people feel valued is undermined by the process of forcing them to compete against one another and awarding the ‘best’ competitors medals (with their distasteful military connotations).
But things are changing, thankfully. It is not just that for the first time the Paralympic Games now has equal billing to the Olympic Games (the lessons of positive discrimination suggest it should really have top billing, of course). The signs are that the games in London may at last be a properly commun-ity-based, consensual and democratic affair.
There was a huge advertisement in the Sunday Times last weekend from the various quangos set up to run the Olympics, under the meaningful and powerful headline ‘Together’. The photograph at the top of the ad showed some British schoolchildren running across a playground, with great determination. Importantly, none of the children was what we might call ‘white’, which is good. I think we’ve seen and heard quite enough of white children, haven’t we? The only justification for having white children in the photograph would have been to have them apologising to the black children for thousands of years of slavery and cultural and military imperialism.
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