Letter from Europe: Is Failure More Desirable Than Success For London 2012?

Possibly the last Letter from Europe opinion piece, to appear in the next V02max Magazine. Currently, time isn't on my side so I'm going to take a break from doing it for the time being.

As London approaches the one year to go mark for the 2012 Olympic Games, the over-riding feeling one gets from reading the British papers is that it’s going to be a flop. But upon closer inspection, it seems more likely that in fact the papers are eagerly waiting, perhaps even hoping for a flop.

Failure is as much celebrated in Britain as winning. It’s a national joke that the English football team haven’t won a major tournament since 1966, and until recently, it wasn’t a proper summer unless England lost a test match cricket series.

But for the Olympics, the press seem to be rooting out any signs of failure. A straw poll of the 10 most recent London 2012-related stories at the time of writing showed that the Daily Telegraph website published five stories that painted the Games in a negative light. Just three stories were about sport, four were about legal wrangling and political strife. The remaining three were factual reports about organisation announcements and activities.

The mountain bike course is completed already

It was worse over at The Guardian. Six out of 10 stories were of a negative nature and just one was about actual sport. Things improved at the website of the official broadcaster, the BBC where four out of 10 stories were negative and four items featured sports news.

Maybe it was a bad week to pick. Much coverage was given to arguments about funding, who receives the profits the Games might generate and the complaints and protests about which football club should get the stadium once the Games are over.

At least the London Olympic Games Organising Committee (LOGOG) can find positive stories to talk about. During the same period, their website news reported on the progress in the athletes’ village, that the mountain bike course was finished and that there would be a wide range of ticket options for disabled people. Out of the surveyed 10 stories they carried no less than three paralympic-related items. The Telegraph had one paralympic news item but the Guardian and BBC failed to find anything worth writing about in disabled sports.

It’s not just the press having a go at the Games. A BBC Radio 4 comedy called What Went Wrong with the Olympics aired in late 2010. Set in 2014, the spoof current affairs programme examined the “fiasco that was the London Olympics” which had actually taken place in 2013 since the city hadn’t been ready on time.

Satirist Hugh Dennis recently complained that the stadium being built on time meant that he and other comedians had nothing to joke about. Currently being shown on BBC4 is a TV satirical, mock fly-on-the-wall documentary entitled Twenty Twelve. The show follows the organisers’ various exploits such as trying to figure out how London’s traffic will flow during the Games by creating gridlock, or getting locked inside their offices by their own over-zealous security measures.

Bojo takes a ride at the new velodrome

It’s actually pretty funny stuff, but why the obsession with everything going wrong? Team GB has some top class athletes and swimmers who will win medals. The cycling team may not be as strong as in Beijing but they are still capable of scoring multiple gold medals and the Brownlees start as favourites for the triathlon.

Construction is on schedule (the International Olympic Committee have given glowing reports about the progress made) and tickets are in “strong” demand according to LOCOG.

Olympic logo: weird

OK, so the 2012 logo is a bit weird and there will be glitches leading up to the opening ceremony, but this is surely a moment for the country to get behind what could be a great Games, and to ignore the nation’s media who seem intent of finding any inkling of a disaster, however feeble.