COLUMN

And gold goes to the sponsors

Mihir Bose describes how the Corinthian spirit of the Olympic Games has given way to a tightly controlled franchise
This summers London Olympics will see much talk of how the Games are the last bastion of the Corthinian spirit in sports: athletes competing for honour not money and living communally in a specially built village. Just before the Games begin, Jacques Rogge, President of the International Olympic Committee, will, as he always does, leave his Park Lane Hotel and move to the Olympic Village. To emphasise this Corthinian ethos, no advertisements will be allowed at the Olympic venues. But any idea that this will make 2012 like the 1948 London Games, at which Horlicks was sipped as athletes cheerfully put up with post-war austerity, will be an illusion. In reality, 2012 will be a tightly controlled franchise with strictly policed rules, a final destination on the road travelled by modern sporting events since commercialism made its pitch invasion in the mid-80s. So Londons organisers have been told to deliver a clean city. This means ensuring all billboards advertising products which rival those of Olympic sponsors are removed. Sponsors provide the money, their rights need protecting. The IOC can impose these rules because in the past 20 years politicians have been convinced of the value of sports. In 1987, when Mrs Thatcher appointed Colin Moynihan as her Sports Minister, she revealed that she was immune to the attractions of sport. As he left No 10, she told him: For some extraordinary reason, the press are fascinated by sport. Its likely your appointment will lead on the Six Oclock News. Please keep it quiet until then. Her successors are all too eager to be associated with sport. So in the spring of 2011 Barrack Obama, making his first state visit to Britain, played table tennis with David Cameron against schoolboys in London. British papers analysed their ability and playing styles as indicators of their performance in office. Britain is spending 9.3 billion to host
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COLUMN

Perils of European optimism

The inability to imagine failure is reminiscent of 1914, writes Paul Mason
Two years into the financial crisis I was talking to a British investor who allocates tens of billions of pounds, and whose idea of bedtime reading is medieval monetary history. Wouldnt the emerging markets be the winners in this crisis, I asked. She looked me in the eye and said: Were not called the First World for nothing. The West, she said, and more specifically the Anglo-Saxon West, had a 400-year history of dumping the social costs of economic crisis on to somebody else. Cue the second wave of quantitative easing in America, which exported inflation to the rising economic powers such as Brazil, India and China; cue Americas $14 trillion debt pile, and a continued fiscal stimulus, which has brought growth back to America while piling extra risk on to those who have lent America the $14 trillion. But one Western elite has spectacularly failed to perform in a First World manner: the Europeans. Though the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers in 2008 signalled the crisis of an elite ideology in the USA neoliberalism the Americans were able to adapt and survive. Even politically, they have so far headed off fragmentation: the Occupy movement will vote for Barack Obama; the Tea Party, which began as a revolt against Wall Street, is now beholden to Wall Street to fund its politicians. In Europe, meanwhile, the elite is paralysed, suffering an advanced crisis of legitimacy, and might yet crash its own project. This is seen not just in the rush to vote for non-centrist parties. It is apparent in the sudden repatriation of capital that is beginning to happen as the Euro-crisis veers towards a Greek exit from the eurozone. The Greek crisis though an extreme case provides a textbook in which the Euro-elites can read their future. We are not there yet, but if events in the euro-zone continue their downward spiral this is how it will be. We now have to imagine a Europe in which France is run by Marine Le Pen, the National Front leader, or by a socialist president under heavy leftist influence; in which Spain is bankrupt; in which UKIP, the Dutch Freedom Party and the True Finns call the shots in coalitions where traditional centrerightists have been pushed towards the nationalist fringe. Just to imagine it prompts the question: why has the European centrist elite proved incapable of swerving away from danger? Ultimately it is trapped in a structure of its own creation. If we measure just debt, America is in a worse state. Debt equals 100 per cent of gross national product, and rising, with political paralysis. Euroland, taken as an aggregate, is solvent and on paper fiscally sustainable. But the aggregate is no longer backed by political will. To maintain the rules of the single currency, one after another the countries of the periphery are being forced into a death-spiral of austerity. First Greece, then Spain. Throughout the crisis, the Euro elite has suffered from the same inability to imagine failure that led to August 1914. Even days before the outbreak of war, it was thought impossible because the consequences would end the system, and everybody would be the loser. As the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig commented: our common optimism betrayed us. And once the system fails, the European elite has a historic mind-set it can relapse into: on the day of the Nazi election victory in Germany, the Anschluss, and the French surrender in 1940, Europes political class echoed the immortal words of the French socialists in 1914: Events have overwhelmed us. As I write this I can feel hackles rising even my own: it is distasteful for the European centre to discuss the catastrophes that created it. But this social silence lies at the heart of the problem: it is what allows the same politician to pop up on TV arguing that Greek exit from the euro is impossible because of the consequences to the eurozone, then a year later propose it as inevitable because of the consequences of avoiding it. That said, we are not yet at the position where the majority of voters in stricken countries have deserted the centre. Even in Greece, the sudden rise of Syriza and the Democratic Left two orphan parties of Euro-communism merely reflects the move of socialdemocratic voters away from a party, Pasok, which gave up social democracy in favour of the Euro-rules. But the cracks in the political system through which the European peoples have bestowed legitimacy on centrist politics are dangerous. The Greek fascist party, Golden Dawn, proclaimed its election credentials by bussing six coachloads of supporters to attack a migrant camp in Patras in front of the TV cameras. I know that camp well. When I interviewed migrants from Sudan, Afghanistan and Morocco stranded there earlier this year, one said to me: This is not Europe. Ive been to Europe: and this is not Europe. The sad thing is, it is Europe but the Europe we thought we had left behind. l Paul Mason is Economics Editor of BBC Newsnight and author of Why Its Kicking Off Everywhere
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The Olympic Park under construction the 2012 Games. One argument in favour of this is that the Games have ensured the development of the East End. Tessa Jowell, Secretary for Culture, Media and Sport under Tony Blair, also saw it as elevating the nations status and used it to persuade him to back Britains Olympic bid. As they sat in the Downing Street garden she told him that it would be a great shame if the fourth largest economy as Britain then was could not even bid for the greatest show on earth. Blair was so taken that, although the vote in Singapore in June 2005 was on the eve of a G8 summit that he was hosting, he squeezed in a visit there to help London defeat the favourite Paris. Britain is clearly distinct from the countries that have recently won the right to host the Games or World Cup since 2008. Most belong to the so-called BRICS group of rising economic powers Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa and have something to prove to the world. In many ways the most revealing political wooing was that by Nelson Mandela to secure South Africa the 2010 World Cup. I was made vividly aware of this on May 14, 2004, a day before the Fifa executive met to vote on the bid. In

Zurichs Grand Dolder Hotel in the hills above the Fifa HQ, I saw Mandela and Thabo Mbeki, then President of South Africa, emerge from their suite with Jack Warner, a Fifa vice-president. Warner controlled three votes on the 24-man executive and could swing the election. What these three discussed has never been revealed but the next day South Africa won and at the celebratory lunch Mandela duly raised a glass to his new friend. Mandela knew that Fifa would behave as if it was a Vatican of sport. In South Africa, Fifa even forced through a law change so that football-related offences were brought to court within weeks. This in a country where it take years for a normal case to come to court. Mandela was willing to pay that price to show that his rainbow nation could host the World Cup. Back in 2002, then at The Daily Telegraph, I launched the campaign for London to bid for the 2012 Games. The reason I was in favour was at that stage this country had, unlike the French, been wretched on big projects witness the Dome or Wembley and I felt it was time to prove we could do better. However, it was after the victory that too little was done to explain what hosting the Olympics meant. Unlike Rio, Britain did not need the Olympics to announce its arrival as a nation. What was also not explained was that the Olympics meant regeneration of the East End and this would be costly, pushing the budget up from 2.34 billion to 9.3 billion. When I revealed this, many involved in running the Olympics were unhappy. What is still being skated over is that the control exercised by the IOC means these Games are far removed from the Corthinian principles that inspired the original Olympics. l Mihir Bose is the author of The Spirit of the Game, How Sport Made the Modern World

john maclean/view/corbis

In Europe, the elite is paralysed, suffering a crisis of legitimacy and might yet crash its own project