According to the news, participation in sporting activities has actually decreased significantly since 2012. A major part of the bid was based on the assurance that if London got the Olympics it would mean that more and more people - and particularly the young - would be drawn into sporting activities.
My own feeling is that it is not just about providing the facilities for engagement in sporting activities. In my own area, our leisure facilities are in the process of being updated and in one case completely rebuilt. However, over the last few years more and more people are working longer hours for less money, and engaging routinely in sports is neither very practical for them nor affordable. Some people just feel exhausted and demoralised and that is also not really conducive to taking on new challenges and activities.
The legacy of the Olympics seems to me to have been an admittedly first class well landscaped Olympic site which to some extent benefits local people (although at the expense of many local council and private tenants and small businesses that were forced to move). However, the legacy was supposed to be not just about the regeneration of a very unattractive and polluted area of east London but should have been involving the whole country in pursuing a whole range of sports and physical activities - some competitive and some not.
What really annoys me is the Legacy organisation which has formed loose partnerships with various charities who then push a self-serving "legacy" agenda to schoolchildren, many of whom are too young to remember the Olympics and who have never visited the site.
They don't really care do they
Good Morning Good Friday 29th March 2024
Shall we reboot our cartoons thread again? 😁
Water Pollution -“ A National Disgrace”? A case for renationalisation?