Sex and drugs and forward rolls

Not for the first time in history, the question of doping has arisen at the Olympics. This time, it took until Monday for a US Olympic voice to publically question the record-smashing swim of China’s 16-year-old Ye Shiwen.

She has already been tested (there are billboards all over London advertising the role of smithglaxokline in testing) and, apparently, found to be utterly clean.

That’s no certainty of anything either, though – for a variety of reasons, from a drug being known by the testers, the drug no longer being detectable, masking agents – and probably loads more things.

There’s also, once we delve into this sort of thing, the question of who is testing the testers? But that's another question.

But I’m prepared to say this: Ye is very unlikely to be a completely ‘natural’ swimming miracle. And neither is any other swimmer or competitor in London.

Let me explain.

The only surprise about ‘drugs’ in sport is that anyone has ever convinced themselves that any of this is new.

There are plenty of references to athletes and warriors in ancient times taking all manner of things if it helped their performance.

According to Scandinavian mythology, the Beserkers would drink a mixture of bulotens, possibly made from some sort of a (magic?) mushroom, to increase their physical power – even though there was a risk of it sending them a bit, err, beserk.

In WWII and since, pilots have often been stuffed to the gills with whatever is necessary to keep them awake.

Ancient Greek athletes used special diets and potions to improve their performance. Cocaine and caffeine have both been used down the years.

One Abraham Wood, a participant in endurance walking races in Britain in the early 19th century, said in 1807 that he’d used laudanum (opium) to keep him awake for 24 hours while competing.

And by 1877, such races had stretched to 500 miles, with competitors talking almost no sleep, according to the Illustrated London News. Draw your own conclusions on the basis of logic.

Organisers decided that endurance cycle races could be even more exciting for the spectator. As Les Woodland describes it in This Island Race: Inside 135 years of British bike-racing, “a tired walker, after all, merely sits down – a tired cyclist falls off and possibly brings others crashing down as well. That’s much more fun”.

By the time modern Olympics got underway, strychnine was in use too. In the 1904 Games, US marathon runner Thomas Hicks was struggling, before trainer Charles Lucas pulled a syringe and, as he later put it himself, gave Hicks a “milligram of sulphate of strychnine” and “a large glass brimming with brandy.”

Personally, I’ve never found that alcohol did anything for my own performance in anything other than sleeping. But it apparently got Hicks going again, although he required a top-up injection four miles from the end.

Drugs continued to be used in cycling.

British cyclist Tom Simpson – the country’s first men’s road race world champion – died of exhaustion during the 1967 Tour de France, with the postmortem revealing amphetamines and alcohol, a cocktail that, when combined with the heat, had proved fatal.

Yet the cause went unreported for some time.

Amphetamines were popular elsewhere – the Everton championship winning football team of 1962-63 were routinely handed Benzedrine, according to goalkeeper Albert Dunlop, who says that he became addicted to them.

Synthetic hormones had arrived on the scene as early as the 1930s.

US doctor John Ziegler developed steroids and gave them to weightlifters after having discovered, in the 1950s, that the Russians were doing something similar. He developed Dianabol – a favourite of Big Arnie, who is reported to have popped them merrily in his days as a professional bodybuilder.

The first attempts at banning the use of drugs in sport came in 1928 from the International Amateur Athletics Federation (IAAF). Other bodies followed suit, but as there was no effective testing, nothing much changed.

Fast forward a few years. The rise of public awareness of drugs in sport – and the concomitant outrage – came with the Cold War, and with sport as one of many proxy wars in that.

It became, in the West, something that the nasty commies did. And drug testing, together with the obscenity of gender tests, gained momentum.

Not that the latter is a thing of the past, as the recent crass row over South African runner Caster Semenya has reminded us. Apparently, you can have the genitals of a woman and all the inside bits in all the right places – and somebody (primarily the IAAF) will question whether you have a ‘condition’ that gives you an ‘unfair advantage’ by, presumably, turning you into something different from a woman. A sort of not-quite-a-woman.

There are arguments that the idea of only two sexes is inaccurate, but disregarding that, to pretend that women are made from a single template any more than men are would be plain daft.

Yet extraordinarily, the International Olympic Committee has actually had its medical commission (led by a man, strangely) recommend to it that women athletes with a “disorder of sex development” (ie ‘too much’ testosterone) have ‘treatment’ – even surgery – to ‘correct’ this, if they wish to continue competing. (Story)

It is a struggle to imagine a scenario where anyone suggested that a man have treatment for ‘too much’ testosterone – or even too little.

Not that it would ever have happened in Baron de Coubertin’s day. The founder of the modern Olympics was, like so many men of his time and class, opposed to women being allowed anywhere near sport. This is what comes of modernity.

But here is the crux of the matter.

In sport, there is no such thing as a level playing field. It is a myth.

There are genetic differences: some people can put on muscle easily, others cannot.

There are geographic differences – altitude etc.

There are financial and educational and training differences; never mind just between countries, but within nations too.

There are cultural differences – are women, for instance, allowed to compete or train or even play sports?

One female athlete may have more testosterone than the statistical norm, but that does not mean that she is not a woman or that she is cheating.

The next point is that it is doubtful that there is a single ‘natural’ athlete in any sport in any country.

Because when you train for a sport, you are not doing what is ‘natural’. We have not evolved with the prime purpose of able to pole vault or run 26 miles in little more than two hours.

For any female athlete, serious training will almost get rid of periods altogether. This is not ‘natural’, if we consider ‘natural’ as being of nature. It is certainly not ‘the norm’.

And it is extremely unlikely that what any athlete does with their diet is ‘normal’ either.

Many if not all will supplement. They will work out the actual food they consume to the finest degree.

Manchester City’s championship-winning football players have a team behind them that makes up entirely legal supplements that are tailored for each individual player’s needs, based on blood and other tests.

Now, push past the propaganda and ask yourself what the real difference is here.

We consider a vitamin C supplement to be ‘natural’. But it’s no more ‘natural’ than a dose of opium.

We have no issue with cocktails of supplements and a diet that is miles from anything that a ‘normal’, healthy-eating person would consume, yet we continue to fall for left-over Cold War propaganda about ‘drugs’. This is largely semantics.

Next big point. Drugs for sport are not made over a Bunsen burner in some backroom of downtown Hackney.

These are state-of-the-art affairs. Quite possibly produced by ‘proper’ pharmaceutical companies, backed by serious, sophisticated research. Many, indeed, are drugs that are otherwise use medically.

Steroids are used to treat many things, from skin problems to arthritis.

In order for the testers to ever ‘win’, they’d have to know what the chemists were next going to create. And unless they develop that telepathy, they will always be playing catch-up.

Next point. It is some time since we reached a stage of utter stupidity in terms of what is tested for and what can get you banned.

A decade or so ago, I did a little athletics training with Essex Ladies. The throwing coach told me that he had had to issue advice to the parents of teenage athletes, telling them that they should not give their child a Lemsip or similar if they had a cold. If they did, and the girl was then visited for a random test the following day, she would fail and be banned.

This is clearly an idiotic situation. Goodness knows how much of a cold cure you’d have to consume to give yourself a sporting advantage over and above not snivelling as you ran, but it isn’t one.

You can have ‘too many’ cups of coffee and fail a test. Yet 400m hurdles world champion, Olympic gold medallist and world record holder Sally Gunnell would, in a state of pre-race nerves, chain smoke as she waited to enter a stadium.

So Lemsip is banned – but nicotine is not.

In other words, this is not about the health of the athletes. And nor is it about how something is produced – caffeine potentially bad, a highly-processed supplement, not.

And it is doubtful that there is a single, serious athlete on Earth who is ‘natural’ or unassisted in some way or other.

That, in itself, is not remotely a bad thing. When people are stretching themselves beyond the bounds of ‘normal’ human activity, then it is entirely appropriate that they should look for way to help themselves do that better.

It’s worth dealing with another myth here: even steroids don’t mean laziness; the instant transformation of a sporting also ran to a champion. One of the major things that they do is to speed the body’s recovery time, thus meaning that you can work out longer, harder and more frequently. Other legal substances do the same, just as legal concoctions are used to promote muscular development, fat loss – and many other things.

As I have outlined, the war against drugs in sport cannot win. So it seems to me that we need to do a number of things.

We need to start with an honest debate, raising the issues that I have raised here and cutting through the sludge of propaganda that has informed the issue for decades.

It would seem logical to wipe the slate clean in terms of what is tested for. And only to start testing again for substances (and amounts) that can damage the health of an athlete.

We also need to get rid of the obscenity that is continued sex tests.

Anything else is a waste of time – as well as being intellectually dishonest.

From London, with love

Right, well, here we are in the first week proper of the Olympics, with warnings echoing in our ears of how this is the moment when it all hots up in terms of traffic.

Indeed, there I was on my bus this morning, getting lost in the sheer gloriousness of Beethoven’s Third, when cutting right beyond the safety of my earphones came the voice of Bloody Boris once again.

It seems to be a sort of game of Russian Roulette, whereby you have no way of knowing whether the bus you hop aboard will, during the course of your own journey, spew out the recorded message from the mop-topped, whiffy-waffy one.

And it came after I had been briefly – well, for about three hours – won over to the London 2012 spirit.

The opening ceremony on Friday night was a revelation; an extraordinary piece of theatre. After the national cringe that came with Bo Jo and the bus in Beijing, it was, first and foremost, a massive relief.

Danny Boyle’s piece was fittingly quirky; something close to a masterpiece of what one commentator called, ‘progressive patriotism’ – and was as far as it was possible to be from the opening to the Chinese Games four years ago; an almost anarchic antidote to that regimented spectacle.

The segment devoted to the NHS was like a wet dream for many left-wingers – understandably, given the lies of the current prime minister about its safety; lies revealed in it’s current dismantling for private profit.

It was a fabulous reminder of how much this institution is cherished, but it was not the start of a revolution – particularly as it sat in the midst of the continuing corporatist orgy and debacle.

Only this lunchtime, sitting outside a small café having a coffee, I watched as a member of Locog’s brand police snooped into the windows of every business in the vicinity, checking to make sure that nobody had dared to use the ‘O’ word in an effort to unfairly gain business from McDonalds or Visa.

And then there is the whole issue of empty seats. While this is apparently not just down to corporate tickets not being used, but to ‘Olympic family’ tickets being unused, together with many that were sent to agencies in other countries for sale and which remain unsold, it is causing further annoyance.

But back to the opening: if the reaction from some on the left was a tad OTT, the reaction from some on the right was an absolute hoot.

Never mind the evening’s reminder of the utter stupidity of Aiden Burley – who, other than a total imbecile, would walk into such an obvious row so soon after the last one, when it emerged that he'd hired the costumes for a Nazi-themed stag do? Career suicide or what?

Because whatever the likes of David Cameron and Bo Jo may really think, they cannot do other than laud Boyle’s extravaganza, as they desperately try to use the entire Olympic experience to sell Brand Britain and boost the economy.

Various people have brilliantly dissected the right-wing objections. One complained at a lack of Shakespeare – presumably either having missed Sir Ken Branagh doing a bit of Prospero while dressed as Isambard Kingdom Brunel (another lefty icon) or not being able to recognise the speech or not hearing the BBC commentator tell the world that that was what it was.

There really is no excuse for such stupidity.

And as for James Bond and Her Maj – yeah, on a par with Lenin.

By the way, it seems that I was not the only one watching that segment and going; ‘No, it can’t be; not really; no: OH MY GOD – IT IS!’

Who, really, could not have been tickled? The corgis, incidentally, were Monty (13) and Holly (nine) – never let it be said that this blog isn't educational!

The opening rural idyll – a pastoral, complete with maypole, village cricket, herded geese and Elgar’s Nimrod – would have delighted the likes of John Betjemen, JRR Tolkein and John Major, lefties all.

I’m not going to attempt to claim that Parry’s setting of Blake’s Jerusalem is anything other than a bit early socialism – but it has long ago reached the levels of being beyond obvious political tribalism to a point of frequently topping (or almost) polls for an alternative to our dirge of a national anthem.

It was a gorgeous segment – and the Industrial Revolution part that followed was as stunning as it was unexpected and shocking in its quite open reminder that the pastoral was destroyed by what made the country into an global power; those 'dark, satanic mills'.

The forging of the Olympic rings was superb too.

And there, in the mix that followed, were Chelsea Pensioners, Yellow Submarines, Jarrow Marchers and Suffragettes – icons of left-wing nonsense, the lot of them.

I lagged a bit after, to the point of missing many of the pop culture references. The idea of using children’s literature alongside Great Ormond Street and the NHS was inspired.

There is an absolute inevitability that not all of the music will have pleased all of the viewers all of the time. But given how much these small islands have contributed to global pop/rock ‘n’ roll over the last decades, it’s hardly inappropriate.

And of course this couldn’t go past without a mention of Rowan Atkinson’s appearance with Sir Simon Rattle – a segment that invoked Les Dawson and Morecambe and Wise; like the brief Bond film, a reminder that we have a sense of humour and can poke fun at ourselves.

Add to that the quite moving choice of people to carry the Olympic flag, the 7/7 memorial and the lighting of the cauldron – which defied all odds to the extent that bookies have returned stakes made on just who would do it – and you had something that managed to combine patriotism, quirkiness, humour and humanity.

Sadly, this was something that went completely over some people’s heads.

Just yesterday, columnist Jan Moir proved to have none of the above qualities as she described the winner of the women’s road race, Marianne Vos, as “some bitch from Holland” in the Daily Mail.

But then, Moir has lots of form. And no, I’m not providing the link here, because I’m not going to help drive the Mail’s traffic.


Just to briefly continue the theme: my mother is what I would describe as a pretty right-wing conservative Conservative, who dislikes immigration in general and detests what the Daily Mail tells her is 'PC'. And discussing the opening ceremony with her, she loved it and thinks it's utter nonsense to describe it as 'lefty'. Which says something about the people who have declared it thus.

We got home to Hackney on Friday evening shortly before the evening ceremonies began, to find around 1,000 people (or more) crowding into the park directly behind us to watch it all on the big screen.

It was noisy. As you’d expect. And as you accept for such an occasion.

My Olympic irritation was not helped over the weekend, though, by having it playing all Saturday (until 10pm), so loudly that I could hear and understand the commentary when inside, with all doors and windows firmly shut. Yet as neighbours on the top floor of our block said, nobody was there watching.

And it was a pattern that was repeated yesterday, albeit with the sound at least slightly reduced.

There have already been some great sporting moments – but by god, this is going to be a long two weeks.

The event that just keeps on giving. And giving

Boudi feels the Iams Olympic effect.

I am in grave danger of being worn down by the Olympics before they even start.

On my bus this morning, there was even a moment when an on-board tannoy played a recorded message by our favourite mop top, Bo Jo, telling us something or other about there being an event on and people being in town because of it.

To be honest, it wasn’t actually easy to hear it properly. I did, however, manage to control my instinct to scream out: ‘shut the **** up you great Tory twok!’ but it was a close-run thing.

Such messages are also playing on train stations and the Tube. It’s like a cross between Big Brother and the Carry On films – a particularly surreal sense of government announcements to tell you the bleedin’ obvious.

Is there really anyone in London who does not, by now, know that the Games are here and, with them, more people, together with traffic restrictions?

It’s hardly been unreported.

And then there are the new swathes of advertising all over the place.

There are banners around with the Olympic logo on. Okay: for street furniture, they’re fine – although I'm sure that nice Eric Pickles had declared war on such things.

Then there are the BT phone boxes that now have Olympic-related ads on them.

And the latest tranch of ones to appear in the centre of London are just utterly crass.

They are hung in pairs on lampposts, and many are straightforward adverts. Some, however, show pictures of assorted members of the GB squads.

And they have nice sponsorship endorsements on them – mostly, it seems, from Proctor & Gamble, the US company that owns a number of well-known brands.

TV ads have been telling us for weeks that Olympic swimming champions need to wash their hair with Head & Shoulders before a race.

Now in the guise of ‘proudly supporting’ the athletes, they have liberally dished out loads of brands to different sportsmen and women.

Thus heptathlete Jessica Ennis’s picture on one of these ‘supporting’ banners has Olay below it.

For one swimmer, it’s Max Factor – because a girl does need her lippy in the pool. A Braun shaver for a synchronised swimmer – and Pampers nappies and Fairy for Paula Radcliffe because – well, presumably because she a mum and not because of that little episode at the 2005 London Marathon.

If you wanted to show support for the athletes, couldn’t you just do it without turning it into an utterly tacky advert?

Not that this sort of Olympic bonus is just for the athletes.

You can also have Olympically clean dishes, thanks to the P&G’s dishwasher products. Although given that the Olympics are Greek, shouldn’t we dispense with the dishwashers – and smash our plates instead?

And I was tad concerned to realise that Iams, the cat biscuit (I had no idea that this was a P&G product) now comes complete with Olympic branding too.

What will the impact be on The Girls? Will Boudi take Queen B grouching to new heights? Will Loki be even faster through the trellis into Tom’s garden next door? Will Otto actually turn around and tell me that the steak at the weekend was infinitely better than any biscuit and she wants more of that straight away please?

Yesterday, the sport itself began with the start of the women’s football.

Which was a relief, to be honest – even if the stadium for the GB side’s opener was hardly full, and then there was the cock-up later with the wrong Korean flag: oops.

Perhaps that will stop everything else feeling so utterly intrusive, if not downright offensive. Although given that the council has now decided that the park directly behind the flats that I live in is now hosting a big screen for the entire affair, plus sports ‘taster’ sessions, the former seems unlikely.

Ode dear, what can the matter be?

In an echo of the first modern Olympic Games, London mayor Boris Johnson has commissioned an ode.

In those days, poetry was an Olympic event – indeed, as explained here by Mary Beard, Baron de Coubertin himself won a prize for one of his own efforts.

But this evening, at the big gala at the Royal Opera House, Bo Jo will remind us of his own classical education by intoning the poem – in both Greek and English – to the watching billions.

Don’t worry though; we don’t have to wait. The Telegraph published it here.

Charmingly, it’s every bit up to the standard of de Coubertin.

And inspired by the spirit of heightened cultural endeavour that has arrived in the metropolis, alongside the sporting kind, I offer up my own humble response; my own ode to the Pindaric ode.

You can make up your own minds whether it’s an ode to joy or not.

Ode to some event or other

The summer has arrived at last

Together with a sporting cast,

To jump and run in this fair town –

So woe on you who wears a frown!

To mark this rather splendid time

We must not whinge or ever whine;

And don’t dare jest, lest you provoke

The wrath of Coe’s policing folk

There’re guns on top of peoples’ flats

And rules made up by tin-pot twats;

Beware of spilling custard dears,

When highlighting your cash cow fears

Boris says the lanes must be

For those ‘who work’ – not thee or me;

He’s had a little ode penned too

About this farce to bill and coo

The legacy, we’ve all been told

Will last until the Earth is cold;

Or at least until the day

When corporate sponsors fly away

Food banks may well be on the up,

As austere plans now prove a pup;

But since man can’t live just on loaves

A circus into view now hoves

'Is it here yet?'

‘Are all these people waiting to see the torch too, mummy?’

‘Yes, I think so, dear.’

‘Is it here; is the torch here yet, mummy?’

‘I think it’s coming … yes! Oh no. It’s lots of police. Look, they’re from the Met and they’re waving and being friendly, and – look, can you see? Some of them have got Wenlocks on their bikes.’

‘Is this it now?’

‘No, no – it’s a man collecting money for our soldiers. He’s got an inflatable torch – you see? – although he doesn’t really look very happy.’

‘Can you see it, mummy? Is it coming now?’

‘Almost! Oh, hang on. No; no. It’s a big blue lorry covered in … ah, it’s Samsung. There are lots of very happy young people though, and they seem to be giving away nice blue flags.’

‘Is this is coming now, mummy?’

‘It could well be … oh, no; not yet. It’s a big red lorry this time, with lots more young people handing out bottles of (non-diet, I see) Coke and something that might be a frisbee or a picnic plate.’

‘Is it here now, mummy?’

‘I’m not sure, maybe: no, it’s a big green bus from Lloyds Bank. There are lots more jolly young people – there are an awful lot of jolly young people today, aren’t there? This time, they’re handing out green streamer things.’

‘Is this is, mummy, is it coming now?’

‘Yes, dear … this is ... oh no. It’s a man on one of the mayor’s Barclay’s Bikes; he seems to be protesting about something. He has a notice on the front that says something about Barclays pensioners being duped.

‘I’m surprised he’s not been asked to leave the procession. I’m not sure this is the time or place for political statements.’

‘Is this the torch now, mummy? Is it here now?’

‘Yes dear, this is finally it. Can you see?’

‘Is that it, then, mummy?’

‘Well dear, you got a flag. What else can you want?’

Grumbling for Britain

In the past, the Olympic Games have included demonstration sports as well as the usual events.

Boules was one of several demonstration sports in 1900, in Paris, rather unsurprisingly. There was Finnish baseball in 1952 in, err, Finland, and roller hockey in 1992 in Spain.

It seems to be a great opportunity to spread the word more widely about a national activity that hasn’t made it globally.


Well, roller hockey aside, since that’s played in far more countries than Spain (nearly 60) which indeed, is also far more than American football (18).

I can't help feeling that British organisers have rather missed a trick on this score. We could have done grumbling as a demonstration sport. We’re really rather good at it.

In fact, we’re so good at it, that columnist David Arronovitch has recently been complaining about the rest of us complaining about the Sporting Event We’re Not Really Supposed to Name – which feels a tad like unfair practice for our demonstration event.

Of course, one of our most popular topics for complaint is the weather, and since the last few months seem to have provided us with deluges of Biblical proportions, there’s been plenty to feel peeved about.

After all, we’ve not had much of a ****** (word banned by Locog), so there’s been little opportunity to get out in the sun and working on giving the skin a ****** (another word banned by Locog) glow.

It’s been enough to turn your hair an elegant shade of ******.

Such an event would best be carried out with the aid of a beer – we do like to moan over a pint – and since Heineken is the official beer of the Sporting Event Which Must Not Be Named, this might be useful, since it would give competitors an additional reason to whinge.

It seems a fair bet (there are no official bookies, it seems) that we’d claim ****, but certainly a ***** of some colour.

And all this would be happening in the city of ****** in the year **** – brought to you by Samsung and Panasonic and McDonalds, timed by Omega and with hair washed (before the event) by Head & Shoulders, courtesy of Proctor & Gamble (which is presumably the bankers’ branch of choice too).

Because we can, we’ll fly in on British Airways, drive to the event in a BMW, wear an Adidas kit and sugar load, courtesy of Cadbury’s and Coke, before the starter pistol sounds.

And when we’re all pissed on the official beer (which is perfectly pleasant to drink when sitting outside a café, alongside the Prinsengracht in Amsterdam), we’ll suddenly suffer a fit of tourettes that would make the gods on Mount ******* blush, and we’ll start saying the words we’re not allowed to say by edict of Locog – only to be disqualified from the competition.

Distraught and bitter, we’ll be escorted away by squaddies with a limb or two missing, multi-tasking as guards while they wait to compete in the **********.

We’ll stagger out of the arena, wheeling through the glossy new shopping centre that’s next to the ****** Park, and on towards Stratford station to catch a train back into the centre of ******.

We’ll be back in town before ****, so in excellent time to further drown our sorrows before last orders.

But that’s where it’ll all go further awry. We’ll slip and be permanently injured on the detritus left by people feasting on the products of the corporate ********; detritus that hasn’t yet been bagged and binned by those being housed nearby in a temporary shanty town and paid peanuts to clean up.

And this will thus ensure that we’ll be able to do it all over again in September – this time not as ********* ordinaire, but as ************, in the ********** *****.


Who could have known that the BBC’s sitcom about the ********, ****** ******, would have got so much so right?

Truly, my friends, this will be a year when the ******* motto, ******, ******, ******** will need changing to Slower, Lower, Weaker to describe our own situation in the face of the exploits of William Hague's bag carrier, Seb Coe, Locog and the *******, their corporate friends, in the pursuit of ever-expanding profits and stomachs.


What a bunch of ******* *******.

UK food gets an Olympian boost

Cheese. In Hackney. Chosen so as not to upset Locog.

I honestly wish that I could start feeling enthused about the forthcoming Olympic Games.

After all, I live in an ‘Olympic borough’ and I love sport.

But the reality is that the nearer we get, the grumpier and more utterly pissed off I’m becoming with the entire thing.

On Monday, on BBC Newsnight, east London cardiologist Dr Aseem Malhotra reported on the links between processed foods and rising obesity – increasingly a disease of poverty rather than, as it used to be historically, one of wealth.

In another ‘Olympic borough’, which he characterised as ‘a fresh food-free zone’, he found rising levels of obesity and diabetes.

These, the doctor is certain, are related directly to a diet that is almost completely made up of processed food.

And it’s ironic, therefore, that the Olympics Games – supposedly a celebration of health and fitness – are being sponsored by global brands including McDonald’s and Coca-Cola.

In a vastly more nuanced approach than the scattergun tactics of many others in the medical profession, Dr Malhotra said that fats are not the key problem, but the main issue is the sugars that have no nutritional value, but which are present in large amounts in most processed foods.

He also stresses that the argument that a bit of exercise can solve all problems is a fallacy, since “one would have to run for five hours to burn the calories of consuming a chocolate bar, a packet of crisps and a burger and chips washed down with a fizzy drink.”

Personally, I can’t imagine anyone eating that at any time, but that is the sort of diet that some people in the area he was visiting are eating on a regular basis in this fresh food desert.

It’s easy to criticise, but if you have no cooking skills (and regular readers here will understand that this is never a given, even when brought up in a home where fresh food was always on the table) or if, for instance, you live in dismal accommodation with no cooking facilities, then a good diet, based on fresh food, is not always obviously easy.

That’s just two reasons: there are plenty more, including parents who can’t/won’t feed their children properly and, indeed, the myth that people don’t have the time to cook from fresh regularly or can’t afford to do so.

You can read an article on the subject, by Dr Malhotra, here.

It’s followed by a series of statements from the International Olympic Committee, the London Organising Committee and four of the biggest sponsors of these Games.

Which, in effect, boil down to: ‘if we fund a bit of grassrootsy stuff and/or operate a few play schemes for children, that entirely counteracts any negative aspects of what we spend millions promoting. Or at least it allows us to stick a finger up at anyone raising issues about the links between our products and health problems’.

Now bear in mind that these companies (and others, such as Visa) are getting to have monopolies in and around the Games venues. Which leads to farcical situations anyway.

To give you a flavour: in Coventry, where Coventry City FC is hosting some of the football at the Ricoh Arena, the stadium name has had to be removed – and even local street signs for it have had to be changed.

There are apparently instances, up and down the land, of workers running around pasting blank labels over the manufacturer’s name on hand dryers in the toilets, so that corporate sponsors don’t feel threatened.

At the ExCeL Centre in London, a husband-and-wife catering team have been told that, after 12 years operating on site, that they have to tow away and store (at their own expense) their two vans for the duration. There’s no compensation.

I have heard (via The Other Half) that a local furniture maker in Hackney has been told that he cannot open his workshop, which is near the Olympic Park. Why? Because the organisers don’t want ‘unnecessary traffic’.

There are going to be serious limits on the number of vehicles companies such as Thames Water or TV/internet/phone supplier Virgin can have in the entire capital. Hopefully we won’t have a massive burst water pipe, then. And we've had the circular from Virgin that, in effect, announces a reduced service.

And were that not enough, all these companies are, from March gone to November this year, being treated as offshore entities for tax purposes. In other words, they won’t have to pay a penny of UK tax on any earnings in this country during that period.

It’s no wonder they sponsor such events, is it?

I've posted previously about this, but it isn’t getting any better.

Now unfortunately, this seems to be the general pattern at major sports events these days. There were pathetic stories of corporate bullying and the government giving in to such companies and actions during the 2010 World Cup in South Africa, for instance.

And in the case of the UK, giving big business a helping hand isn’t new either – or limited to major sporting events.

But what we’re seeing here really does make one question just who the Olympics is for. And there is little that I have seen to suggest that it is for the ordinary Londoner, who has been paying additional local taxes to help pay for it for some years (and will continue to do so for some time yet).

Of course, it’s possibly quite brilliant to get the plebs to pay for their own bread and circuses. And perhaps it will distract people from the recession.

Watch out for the government trying to bury news, though.

And this is without discussing the stories about heavy-handed clamping down on use of the Olympic logo, the word ‘Olympics’, complaints on Twitter, missiles on the top of people’s homes, landlords evicting people so that they can charge more rent for visitors during the Games … and so much more.

On a slightly different note, check out this superb article by classicist Mary Beard on the reality of the ancient Olympics (and the awfulness of Baron de Coubertin’s poetic efforts).

But at the weekend, Beard also blogged about watching the Olympic torch pass by her home early on Sunday morning.

It was accompanied – a point I’d missed in all the ‘official’ media hype – not just by the security bods, but also by assorted sponsors, handing out freebies, from fizzy drinks to flags with the sponsor’s name on them.

I’d love to see Tom Daley win a diving gold. Oscar Pistorious is set to make history, breaking down a further boundary by competing in both Olympics and Paralympics. I know someone whose teenage (just) granddaughter will be swimming in the Paralympics and obviously will be rooting for her.

There are all sorts of things I would like, from a sporting perspective.

But I’m not alone in feeling that, even though, as Beard so delightfully explains, the romantic myths about the Games are just that, this is taking thing just too far to feel much inclined toward an orgy of flag-waving excitement and corporate profiteering.


The latest comments on the corporatisation of the Olympics come from as diverse a range of media as The Telegraph and The Guardian.


No, it really is not just me.

Getting ready for the Games

Some of you might have missed it, but this is an Olympic year.

And indeed, it's the year of the Games being in London. Further to that, I happen to live within an Olympic borough. Exciting or what?

Well, let's pass over the point of my personal excitement for the moment, but in a wider spirt of enthusiasm, I thought I'd share with you a logo that I spotted the other day.

A local college, which I pass every day on my way to work, has just been decked out to advertise the fact that it's undertaking 'Games maker training'.

Now quite apart from the fact that that is an horrendous use of language, I couldn't help but notice the branding on a large banner hanging outside the college.

And that's what I reproduce here.

The only difference on the one I spotted at the college is that there's a Cadbury's logo to the bottom right, outside the dark blue box.

It didn't take long before I started wondering why a sponsor's logo has equal prominence with the logos of both the Olympic and Paralympic Games.

Might it be telling us something about what the Games are really about?

And what does it say about any expected – or even desired – Olympic legacy?

I leave that to your imaginations.