Tom Miers: Olympic fail on every level

The Games have been corrupted by government money, lack of talent and little public interest in the events

Much is written about the hubris of world sporting bodies such as the International Olympic Committee, with its pompous officials taking over the streets, hotels and even advertising hoardings of London. But the real story is the moral bankruptcy of the tournament itself.

Olympic participation has become little more than a government vanity project. Not just for the hosts, with their bribes and their billion-pound structures. But for all the big competing nations, with their costly pursuit of meaningless medals.

For many years the IOC struggled – as many sporting administrations did – with the question of professionalism. Being paid to practiSe was akin to cheating and regarded originally rather as drug-taking is now. How could paid athletes properly represent the gentlemanly sporting ethic that Pierre de Coubertin, who founded the modern Olympic movement, sought to foster?

In the end, in the interests of matching the finest athletes against each other, an uncomfortable accommodation has been reached in most Olympic sports (though some, such as boxing and football, retain barriers to full professionalism).

Yet the Olympic authorities were fighting the wrong battle. The true enemy of sport is not money itself. Money, voluntarily paid by sporting audiences, may afford advantages which not all can access. But at least it reflects public priorities.

No, the real enemy of sport is government. It is when governments intervene to manipulate sporting outcomes that corruption truly sets in. And it is in this sense that the Olympics fail the moral test, much more so that the supposedly venal big money contests of the Premiership, the WBA or the PGA. For when sporting success becomes a function of government spending, it loses all credibility. Consider the tables on this page.

One shows the top rank of countries by GDP – the best measure of the total financial resources of each state in 2008. The other shows the medal table for the Summer Olympics of the same year. The similarities are very striking. There is clearly a close link between performance at the Olympics and a country’s total wealth.

But the link is not governed solely by money. There is a strong element of state intervention too. The only poor nations in the table are Cuba, Belarus and Ukraine. It is not as if these countries have more than their fair share of natural sporting talent. Each has a strong legacy of Communist promotion of sport as a source of national prestige. Other successor states to the USSR also punch above their weight at the Olympics.

The presence of these communist throwbacks betrays the truth about Olympic sport – it is not only about wealth, but about the extent to which the state commandeers the nation’s wealth and directs it into sport. So money helps, but its impact is multiplied by government action. This factor is important in considering the merits of sporting triumph. It distinguishes the Olympics from other sports, but in the opposite way intended.

For of course money plays a vital role in all high level sport. It is used to gain advantage by allowing people to become professional, thus harnessing their talents more effectively. Football success, for instance, is closely related to money, particularly at club level. Manchester United buys the best players, and wins more games and trophies as a result.

Does money therefore invalidate the success of the club? No, because it attracts money voluntarily. Manchester United’s wealth is a product of a long accumulation of support over many years. Its success is in large part a function of its popular appeal – its value as a source of entertainment. Over the long run, if you play good football, you attract a larger audience and more revenue.

In other words money, voluntarily given, reflects society’s judgment of the merit of sport. Games like football, tennis, cricket and rugby are wealthy because they are popular.

In the Olympic Games, this dynamic is turned on its head. The reward for success is medals, and governments have come to the conclusion that Olympic medals bestow national prestige. The irony is that the easiest way to obtain medals is to target sports that are uncompetitive, either because they have little popular following (and so few participants), or are difficult and expensive to organise conventionally. Another way of putting it is that Olympic reward goes to sports that have little value in the estimation of the public.

Shamefully, Britain is particularly guilty of this tendency. A breakdown of Britain’s medal haul in 2008 shows that almost all our success came in sports that require lots of money but generate little of it from popular support. Top level cycling and the various boating disciplines require expensive, esoteric equipment and facilities. Yet they have almost no appeal to spectators or TV audiences and so cannot attract revenue from natural public enthusiasm. They are therefore beyond the resources of small or poor countries, unless their governments devote ruinous levels of resources to them. In 2008 two thirds of Team GB’s medals came from cycling, boating and equestrianism, all sports which are in effect closed to competitors from poor countries.

Britain has improved its performance dramatically in the medals table over the last two decades. But not because we have become better at sport. Almost all the improvement is in competitions are that uncompetitive in global terms. In essence, Britain has simply targeted Olympic events which attract little interest in an effort to boost its medal tally.

The Olympic Games are becoming increasingly dominated by such sports. There are ten different sailing events, in various types of boat, and you can win cycling medals on a BMX, on a mountain bike, in a velodrome or on the road. Some of these sports are beyond the reach of most of people in Britain, let alone the developing world.

The Olympic authorities are forever under pressure to include yet more obscure sports, or multifarious versions of existing ones. There appears to be an unspoken arms race of wealthy government-backed sporting associations looking for new ways to improve their medal tally by bypassing genuine sporting competition.

For the sports that people ascribe real value to – football, boxing, golf, rugby, tennis, basketball – Olympic success is held to be unimportant. So with the exception of a handful of athletic events which demonstrate pure physical prowess, the rest of Olympic competition is corrupt in sporting terms because it reflects neither talent nor public enthusiasm.

What is worse, the games are corrupt in moral terms because they rely on the coercive deployment of resources by government. Whether or not we like watching people hop, skip and jump, we are forced, on pain of going to jail, to subsidise the participants and organisation that surrounds them.

So the original ideal of the Olympics, amateur and Corinthian in spirit, has now been wholly undermined. The real scandal is the corruption of its sporting ethic.

Millions of British people will watch the Olympics on TV, and hundreds of thousands have applied for tickets to attend the events in person. Such a spectacle is certainly compelling when it takes place on our doorstep, almost whatever the nature of the event. Yet in the past we used to decry regimes that squandered their people’s scarce resources on vanity projects. Now our own government is at it too.

So when news rolls in of the latest medals tally, with all the talk of glory and success, look for those old Communist foes nestling in the table near us and reflect – what exactly have we bought here and why?

• Tom Miers is a consultant and independent commentator