Don’t ask me why I was watching a bit of the extravagant but dead boring Olympics closing ceremony, and to be honest one or two of the sporting events as well, when my interest in sports aspires to nil.
I also read the Guardian/ICM poll results that said 55 per cent of Britons considered the games ‘well worth’ the huge £9bn expense because they ‘were doing a good job in cheering the country during hard times’, and wondered how such expense can be justified in the face of the social problems that need tackling in Britain and elsewhere.
I then watched this country go crazy about Katie Taylor and other boxers, showjumpers and sailors, and like the spoilsport I normally am I couldn’t but reflect on some lessons of the extravaganza, which not only cost a fortune but also heightened divisive nationalist sentiments.
Let me start with racism. If anything, it appeared that there was near to no racism in the London Olympics, if we don’t consider Prime Minister David Cameron’s announcement that he was ending two-hour weekly PE lessons in schools, replacing them with competitive sports, because some schools ‘were teaching Indian dancing’ or such like during PE classes.
Interestingly, however, the pride in British 10,000-metre winner Mo Farah dismantled the facile idea of Britishness. Farah is from Somaliland, where his brother still farms in a tiny homestead in the savannah, and even though he is a British citizen, his victory highlighted the plight of his homeland, caught up in the desperate civil war in Somalia. Britishness seems irrelevant, as according to his brother, Mo “is a Somali whichever flag he holds”.
Another point, the gap between rich and poor countries, was highlighted by the fact that Somalia could send only two athletes to London. Indeed, it seems that the number of medals was proportionate to the amount of public money spent on training athletes. Thus Australia, with ‘only’ $310m spent (some $10m per medal), trailed behind Britain, which came third in the medal stakes after the big spenders the USA and China.
According to Colin Carter, president of the Geelong AFL club, who was on the committee that recommended more funding for grassroots sport: “In a world of massive countries spending a fortune on the Olympics, that is a race that it isn’t smart to even compete in. So don’t value success in that way.”
Which brings me to another form of racial inequality. After boxing Traveller John Joe Nevin won his silver medal, he asked for all pubs in his native Mullingar to be shut for his homecoming ceremony after a number of them either failed to open or refused serve his relatives during his fights. His family chose not to watch the fights in a pub, and for me, this was the best thing that came out of the games – a young Traveller boxer who knows his place in the world, who is not shy about speaking out about anti-Traveller racism, while also representing Irish Travellers and his country with pride.
Not a facile feelgood factor, then, but a clear anti-racist statement by those who experience it. Thank you, John Joe.
Dr Ronit Lentin is head of the MPhil in Ethnic and Racial Studies at the Department of Sociology at Trinity College Dublin. Her column appears fortnightly in Metro Éireann
