Take care of your body. It’s the only place you have to live.
Jim Rohn
The 2012 London Olympics are a distant memory now as are the raft of promises made to persuade us that the reported £9bn cost of staging them would reap rewards for decades.
Involved as I was at the time with coaching kids – mainly cricket – I was sceptical that anything at all would change, certainly so far as the nation’s health was concerned. And certainly, for the kids I was coaching who were far from the leafy valleys.
So much so that I wrote a piece that was published in The Yorkshire Post – heady days indeed – laying out my belief that the money would have been better invested in our schools and facilities.
The original article is here.
Last weekend, a former chairman of the British Olympic Association, Lord Moynihan, conceded that the promise of a “sports legacy” had failed. A House of Lords report made the following comment.
“With a third of the adult population receiving less than two-and-a-half hours of moderate activity a week, with school children facing unprecedented levels of obesity and inactivity, with PE marginalised with woefully inadequate primary school training for teachers – less than three hours in a three-year course…we have become one of the most lazy, inactive nations in the world.”
Which is pretty much as we were heading back in 2012 as anybody at the coalface knew.
Sadly the report also points out that the numbers of volunteers propping up grassroots sport post-2012 actually declined – I am included in that number. You may wonder why?
My take on this is that sport, such as that which remains available for kids, is now a matter of affordability. Gone are the scraggy-arsed kids with hand-me-down-gear (me) with nothing more than a love for a simple game. And that is simply unacceptable.
Gone too it would seem are the inspirational, role-model PE teachers who passed on their love for numerous activities. For many sport is like ballet for a fat lad…fine for a while…if you get my drift.
We just fail to get the value of sport and physical activity whilst at the same time we wail as the NHS being unable to provide our every wish. Meanwhile, top-level sport remains awash with cash, particularly football.
It is a failure of several past and future generations.
Footnote
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