The Winter Olympics is being heralded as a triumph for Team GB and if only we spend even more we are promised even greater glory in 2018 in Korea. Yeah…bollocks.
The claim is that with four medals these were the most successful games for us Brits since the first Winter Olympics in Chamonix in 1924. Er…meet medal inflation.
In 1924 there were 16 events and with one join bronze awarded the UK picked up 4 medals out of a total of 49 medals awarded. That works out at roughly 1 in 12 medals going back to Blighty.
In 2014 there were 98 events (12 more than in 2010) which makes 296 medals awarded so team GB in fact picked up one in 74 medals. As in the book by the Great Melanie Phillips, “All Must have Prizes,” Team GB was six times less successful in 2014 than we were in 1924. Keep on adding the events and Team GB might win 5 next time. How about that new winter sport: The 100 metre swim through icy sewerage to reach the village store? I gather that the Somerset County squad is pretty experienced.
The problem Team GB will have is that we do not get much snow in the UK so for most winter sports the only kids growing up to play will be the offspring of the very rich who spent the winter in the folk’s chalet in Chamonix. And then there is also curling which rivals whingeing about English oppression and trying to die as young as possible by gorging on Deep Fried Mars Bars, pints of Heavy and Benson & Hedges as the national sports of Scotland. A post-independence GB denied glory in bowls on ice would have won just two medals from the posh folk’s sports.
But, with or without the Greece of the North as part of Team GB, we will never flourish at the Winter Olympics. If anything our relative decline of the past 90 years will just gradually continue.
However, these statistically flawed claims of success are now being wheeled out to demand more cash. Over the past four years UK Sport invested £13.4 million from lottery and exchequer funding to achieve the relative failure of four medals – it probably wasted another couple of million quid deciding which particular losers should get the dosh. The lottery is a tax on the poor and the stupid so this is effectively ALL taxpayers’ cash being funded to support the ambitions of, generally, very middle and upper class folks who in the end will invariably fail to win medals.
Can the sports lobby stop lying about success, it is just time to turn the tap off and use the cash to cut taxes for low paid workers, cut the deficit or for something more useful and less doomed to failure.