Go on, admit it. Beijing is boring. Call off 2012 Barbara Ellen
The Observer, Sunday August 10 2008
Well, the Chinese can certainly put on a do. At the Olympics opening ceremony, fireworks were blasting about, hither and thither, like some celestial Jean Michel Jarre concert. And did you see that bit where the Olympic logo was hoisted in the air like five giant shimmering Polo mints? Impressive stuff. And all the time. I was thinking: is it too late for us to get out of hosting this borathon in 2012?
Is it my imagination or, with the Chinese Olympics barely begun, is everyone already either bored stiff or openly hostile? Every report is about the smog, heat, commercialisation, dope tests, blah. And that's not even starting on the human rights issues; so bad even President Bush feels entitled to have a go.
Then there's the great unmentionable - the fact that, whoever the host nation is, the Olympics are always (whisper it) knuckle-chewingly tedious. I keep reading that, this year, there is an estimated global audience of three billion, but who are these people? I don't think I've ever met a person who genuinely cares. Nor can I recall popping around to someone's house, and being told: 'Ssh, damn you - the Olympics are on.'
Indeed, no offence to 'Team GB', but does anyone care about discus throwing, swimming, or fencing? Leastways in the relationship-ending way they care when you start up the vacuum cleaner during a penalty shoot out. Though there are exceptions. When Frankie Gavin, the boxer came home in tears for failing to lose a few pounds to reach his target weight, there couldn't have been a woman in Britain who didn't feel his pain.
The occasional Olympic event or personality might have caught the public imagination over the years (Daley, Kelly, the rowing champs, Eddie the Eagle). But on the whole, the Olympics are akin to a giant internationally sanctioned parents' race on school sports day, and who wants to watch that? Indeed, the Olympics has to be most boring, sprawling, least loved, most over-produced and expensive sporting tournament ever. And in 2012 it's all ours. It doesn't bode well. People are already complaining about the millions it cost to join the Chinese Olympics. Can you imagine the whingeing when we host the thing? By 2012, the Olympics will have been damned as a 'national folly', like the Millennium Dome, only with javelins. Everywhere, people will be moaning that they never wanted them in the first place. And while much has been made of the Chinese public being ordered to view their Olympics as the 'pivotal moment of their generation', I can't imagine them pulling that off here. Refuseniks and curmudgeons that we are, the British Olympics probably won't even rate as the pivotal moment of the fortnight. ......(more)
The complete piece is at:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/aug/10/1
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