Satisfactory Results

At last the 2008 Olympics is over. The end was marked by "celebrations" in hundreds of locations around Britain to rejoice in Britain inheriting the Olympic banner. This will doubtless be only one of countless wastes of money in the 4 year run-up to 2012. One of these pointless ceremonies was held in our local Palmer Park, which houses the stadium for amateur sports events. Bizarrely, there is going to be an associated Arts festival costing at least £40 million ($75 million) as part of the Olympic festivities. Plainly the arts functionaries, as much as the construction companies and hordes of "consultants", can recognise a sucker when they see one. The sucker in question is of course the British taxpayer.

Ben Rice, one of the loudmouth columnists in our local rag, was overjoyed about the surprising British medal success in Beijing and urged the skeptics to shut up - no amount of money was too much to spend on 2012, especially when we waste so much on defense and other areas of public expenditure. Don't pour money down the defense/education/health/agriculture toilet, pour it down my favorite toilet....

He is certainly half-right on that. I recently visited Portsmouth, Britain's main naval base. It is partly a working modern base, partly a historic tourist site. Among the numerous attractions there is a boat ride round the harbour. The advertisement for this ride is done on a chalkboard, to allow for easy amendment according to what ships are in harbour. Not surprisingly, both the Royal Navy carriers were in port. There is nothing for them to do at the moment and I have no idea what these aging warships might be pressed into doing in the near future, apart from sitting in harbour clocking up costs like a taxi meter gone crazy.

These carriers were visible from land as I walked around the historic docks; incongruously they were moored only 300 yards from "HMS Victory", Admiral Nelson's magnificent flagship at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805 and the ultimate in state-of-the-art naval engineering at the time. Will "HMS Ark Royal" be on public display in 2208, proudly showing off her unimaginably obsolete 20th century technology? She and her sister ship are overdue for replacement and £7 billion ($12.6 billion) has been earmarked for two "super-carriers" to be delivered c 2015.

Whether they will be delivered before they are obsolete is anyone's guess. How much they will really cost is a bigger guess. For one thing, there will have to be extensive dredging of the approaches to Portsmouth harbour as the water is too shallow to let these 65,000 ton monsters enter; they will be by far the biggest British warships ever built. What useful military role they might play is an even bigger and hazier guess. They will be as much use as a chocolate furnace in the guerrilla-type operations which seem to figure large in much of the future and in a real naval war would probably be useful only to the Russians/Chinese/whoever as target practice for their advanced missiles. In the British tradition of getting the worst of all possible worlds, they will be almost as big and expensive as the US super-carriers such as "USS Ronald Reagan", but far less capable as they will be able to operate only one type of fixed wing aircraft, a Harrier-style jump-jet. And with only two large ships available and the extremely lethal weapons they will have to face, senior naval commanders will probably be too scared to death to risk even one of them in combat. As they are to be named "Queen Elizabeth" and "Prince of Wales", I wonder if we will see a rerun of the WW2 comedy where Hitler ordered the pocket battleship "Deutschland" to be renamed as he rightly feared losing such a ship.

You can tell the state of British military desperation when there is talk of France building a replacement carrier and that the three new British and French carriers might be shared on some ill-defined cooperation basis. I am not sure if the French have yet forgiven the Royal Navy for sinking their Mediterranean fleet, with appalling casualties, in 1940 - to prevent it being handed to the Germans after the French surrender.

And these carriers cost only a fraction of the money being planned for other dubious military initiatives. But pouring money down one toilet is no sane reason to justify pouring it down a second which is championed by some zealot.

The eye watering extravagance of modern Olympics was brought into focus as I viewed "Chariots of Fire" recently. The recreation of the stadium used in the 1924 Paris Olympics looked like a local amateur track. The director, Hugh Hudson, said on the commentary track that not even many Parisians bothered to turn up for the Olympic events. Every participant was a genuine amateur. Of course it was as ferociously politicized as the 1936 Hitler Olympics, the 1980 Moscow affair or the 2008 Beijing events. For one thing, Germany was banned from participation as ongoing punishment for WW1. And the seeds of the future rot were evident in the Harold Abrahams character employing a professional coach and the Eric Liddell character's obsessive devotion to running and training, sacrificing all else.

The one scene in "Chariots" which unites most critics is the meeting between Abrahams and the two very senior Cambridge professors who deplore his "professional" attitude to his running. "We believe that the way of the amateur is the only one to provide satisfactory results", the Sir John Gielgud codger declares. Just about everyone seems to treat these professors as obviously ridiculous old fossils. Hugh Hudson's commentary heaped more vitriol on these venerable characters, regarding them as preposterous, outdated, repulsive and racist. (A deleted scene, significantly, showed them in a far more sympathetic light as they grieved for their students slaughtered in WW1. But it was emotionally easier to portray them as wholly unappealing). Most of "Chariots" is fictionalized, but it is surprising that Hugh Hudson, commenting in 2004, failed to see how right the old codgers have been proved by events. In passing he noted that security at the 2004 Athens games was costing $1 billion, while the Paris security costs were practically zero. God alone how much security will cost in 2012, especially after one or two more atrocities in London - which are almost certain before 2012.

The overall cost of the 2012 games has soared from a 2003 "estimate" of £2.3 billion to a probable £15 billion (c. $29 billion). At a rough estimate, this would buy over 1.3 million family cars which would stretch end-to-end from New York to Anchorage, Alaska.

Curious word, "Satisfactory". Nowadays it implies something which is generally OK, but not particularly outstanding. No athlete would be satisfied with "Satisfactory". Nothing less than Gold would be regarded as remotely satisfactory. I don't know how much weight Colin Welland meant to put on this word in his Oscar-winning screenplay. But if the old Cambridge codgers implied "satisfactory" to mean the best balance of physical, mental, social and spiritual outcomes they had a very powerful case. Just about everything about the modern Olympics is grossly unsatisfactory. The waste of public money, the security, the politics, the drugs abuse, not to mention the abuse of their populations by totalitarian governments (such as demolishing the homes of 30,000 Chinese to make way for the festivities, intimidating Tibet demonstrators, even daring to send their goons to escort the Olympic torch around Western cities).

The abuse to which modern athletes subject themselves could hardly be recognized as "satisfactory" by any sane, let alone Christian, person. Apart from the death toll of athletes expiring at suspiciously early ages, you get grotesque spectacles such as our Paula Radcliffe trying for the 2008 marathon despite having a stress fracture of her femur....eh?? Wasn't it only stress fractures of the shin bone a few years ago? Now athletes are cracking the biggest and strongest bones in their bodies?? Yet this is the obvious end result of the process exalted in "Chariots", where Eric Liddell was prepared to abandon his missionary work to "run for God"

The only remotely "satisfactory" way forward for the Olympics I have seen suggested is to keep Athens as the permanent venue. The modern facilities are there (largely unused), the historic association is there, and it would eliminate a large portion of the future waste and politicking. But modern high-level athletics itself has plainly passed the point of no return. The money involved even outside the Olympics is just too tempting to permit any satisfactory results; the low-key amateur participants are the only ones likely to achieve them.