How The London Olympics Benefits Londoners
A LOOK at the London Olympic Games:
Anyway, the following is headlined at the Mayor’s
Evening Standard ‘rebuttal’ unitpress office:“London to benefit from nearly a hundred 2012 Games training camps“.
Even the headline sounds more than a tad threatening – it might mean the Kazakh fencing squad pitching tents in Hyde Park or somesuch – but the reality is not so amusing, and by no stretch of the imagination a ‘benefit’ for Londoners:
“Mayor of London Ken Livingstone has welcomed the news that 96 sports centres and facilities across the capital have been selected to appear in a national guide listing training venues for athletes in the run up to the 2012 Games…Out of the 96 training venues selected in London, two thirds are from non-host boroughs, spreading the benefits of staging the 2012 Games across the city. Out of the 36 Olympic sporting disciplines, London is providing training facilities for 28 of them, which include a mixture of major and specialist centres including universities and schools, community facilities, and sport specific clubs“.
So, the ‘benefit’ for Londoners will be that access to the local swimming pool, football pitch, gym etc etc will be curtailed because said Kazakh fencing squad, Ecuadorean volleyball players and for all I know the Vanuatu underwater tiddlywinks team have first call on the facilities.
Croydon, is part of the rather unpleasantly named South East London Cluster, and appears to have got off comparatively lightly in that only a judo club is up for a takeover. That sundry combat sports are being offered training facilities in the grimmer east London boroughs suggests a joke that is too obvious to be worth cracking.
Posted: 4th, March 2008 | In: Back pages Comment (1) | TrackBack | Permalink
