The presence of Andrew O’Hagan, the novelist and columnist, remains something of a mystery to me in the Daily Telegraph. This week’s offering is a bleat about why we stingy Brits cannot get more excited about the 2012 London Olympic Games:
A wonderful Olympic Games – such as those held in Sydney – requires a vast harnessing of common belief, as well as a momentous investment of private and public sector funding. If we cannot rise to these occasions, we should not have bid for the Games. If we don’t get our collective finger out, the terrible (and unsporting) truth is that we will end up looking like a cheap little place with no quality or inspiration to offer the world, and that is sad, too sad to bear, when we are faced with such a gold-getting opportunity.
Ah, yes, we must get our “collective finger out”. We must stop moaning about the cost of these wonderful Games, put on a cheery smile, put a big hand in the wallet and pony up. Well sorry, Mr O’Hagan, that is not quite good enough. If the Games are quite as wonderful as he claims them to be, they should have had no trouble getting funding via the market. Within a few yards of the Games, there is Canary Wharf, with its huge investment banks and legions of financiers versed in the arts of financing long-term infrastructure projects. For example, if the facilities built for the Games could be used for 30 years or more, then why don’t the organisers issue 30-year bonds, rather like in the days of the 19th Century railway boom? It always makes me suspicious when some character like this says what a tremendous idea X is, but then immediately demands public funding for it, as if no one would pay for X out of their free will. And that of course is the problem; the OIympics will not be commercially viable – not if the incompetents who run it can help it.
As the late, great Milton Friedman once put it in Free To Choose, it is – I paraphrase – so much more fun spending other people’s money.
Why would the UK be insane enough to bid for the 2012 Olympics? The costs have now risen from £2.4 billion to £9.3 billion, it will be highly unlikely they will actually remain that low.
We would probably be much better off cancelling them, or if Nu-Lab can’t bare the thought of that, get some credit for bogus ‘European togetherness’ by offering at least half of them to France, as a joint enterprise.
You can’t do things like that. (Share the games with the French, I mean). The International Olympic Committee insists in all kinds of onerous conditions when you bid for the games. One of these is that all the events (with a small number of exceptions – the main one being some of the soccer matches) must be played in the same city in a very small area. These conditions are one of the things that makes holding the games so expensive, but as long as cities keep bidding the IOC can keep insisting.
If it is any consolation, five years ahead of the Sydney olympics things looked like this. The games looked like being a mess, there was lots of whinging, and people in newspapers wrote pompous articles just like this one. The response of government was to throw vast sums of money at the games to avoid embarassment, and the games themselves were pulled off successfully in 2000. And we still don’t know what it all cost. (At the time, lots of junkets of English and London politicians came to Sydney, they saw only the games themselves, decided “We want one of these too”, made a bid, and are now making exactly the same mistakes, and are doing and saying all the same things that Sydney did in the years up to 2000. I am certain that the same thing that happened in Sydney will happen here. Vast sums of money will be thrown at the games and at the event level they will be successful. But oh God, will it cost a lot.
As someone who pays council tax in London, I am as thrilled by all this as you can imagine.
I would be inclined to gloat at our having avoided your misfortune, but …
Being in Sydney in 2000 was no fun, not least because it was full of people who were excited about the Olympics. Hosting the Olympics brings out the smugness in some people. Me, I got out of town and missed the second week.
O’Hagan’s piece is a filler – a device created so that people can be paid for having some opinion or other which is in fact of little consequence. Important clues are the liberal use of positive words and phrases (wonderful, momentous, rising to the occasion). I would include gold-getting but I am not familiar with that one… perhaps a wordsmith’s indulgence, cleverly hinging on those lovely medals of which we probably won’t see many. Ah, the way these novelists play with words…
As far as rousing the tribes to stump up more cash, he then indulges in the wrist-slaps (don’t get our collective finger out, terrible, unsporting [ouch, that hurt!], no quality or inspiration to offer the world, too sad to bear).
I would estimate it took him an hour to rattle this one out, though he may see it as some rallying call in the Churchill mode which will be remembered for years as the crucial turning point in our mistrust of over-priced, over-taxing and over-hyped games. I once argued that by 2012 the skill of special effects means we could simulate a vast stadium while the real events are run on a park running track in Finsbury and transposed electronically into a huge amphitheatre. I say this because most people will see it on TV anyway and it will save zillions in build costs, security arrangements and so on.
On the latter subject, isn’t there going to be a grand mosque there as part of it? I expect there will be something in the Koran about men in shorts that are too short and imported firebrand preachers will call for the death of, well, anyone really.
The problem with attacking Mr O’Hagan (who, I agree, is a moron) is that the powers-that-be at the Daily Telegraph will say “well they are reading his stuff – this shows how clever we are to employ him”.
Making your customers angry at the stupidity of what you publish is not a good way to keep them customers – but this seems difficult for some people to understand.
Of course this is the same Mr O’Hagan who denounced the evil Republicans for not spending money on New Orleans – at a time when taxpayers money was flooding into the place (and achieving nothing in that corrupt dump). His “reasoning” being – there is a lot of poverty here and nothing much seems to be being built, therefore the evil Republicans are not spending enough money.
Mr O’Hagan recently praised a “brave” speech by the junior Sentator for Illinois, but warned that it might cost him the office of President. The speech was standard boiler plate about reclaiming religion from nasty right wing people (i.e. people who think religion is about worshipping God – not the Welfare State) and helped gain the Senator some 30 million Dollars in the last quarter (“liberals” love it when conservative Christians are attacked and they show their love with cash).
And Mr O’Hagan also recently wrote a heil Diana article – who the lady brought the Royals into the modern world, as can been seen by the young Princes love of pop music (and so on and so on).
But (as I said at the top) all this will simply be understood as “you read his stuff, so we are clever to employ him”.
Accept I do not actually buy the newspaper – if there is a O’Hagan article in it (or another stupid article or offensive cartoon).
Yes, you have it, I do not buy the Daily Telegraph all that much any more.
The world of “broadcasting” is comming to an end (in print as much as in radio and television). If someone finds something really stupid in a product he will not buy that product just because it has other good bits in it.
In the modern world (so beloved by Mr O’Hagan) a publication has to be good (or at least nonoffensive) all the way through.
“But do you not want to hear opinions from a radically different point of view from your own”.
No I do not.
I heard them at school, and at all the universities I attended. And I hear them in local politics – and whenever I turn on British radio or television (regardless of station).
If I am going to spend money on something it better have stuff I like in it – not stupid stuff that makes me want to be sick.
If I did want to read collectivist opinions (about “collective fingers” or anything else) I would go to a rather better writer than Andrew O’Hagan.
As for the “games” themselves – they are a money wasting farce.
2012?
Well, I was in Canada for the duration of the Queen’s Golden Jubilee, so I guess I will be there permanently by the time the abortion of the Olympics crawls out of the East End mud.
Let’s face it.
Not exactly a substitute for docks that sent ships all over the world and fed the South, is it?
150 years ago they built the Great Eastern, the double-keel design of which was adapted for the US Navy ‘super-carriers’.
Now they can all get excited about tossing off a few balls and spears and then living with the awful architecture for another hundred years.
In 1976, Denver successfully bid to bring the Olympics in. Then the rest of Colorado successfully pushed a ballot initiative preventing any state money from being spent on the games. The games were then moved because Denver couldn’t or wouldn’t do it on their own, and the private sector (more fools they) couldn’t understand how the added tax and debt burden would benefit anyone.
Supposedly, Denver’s been bidding to bring in the 2014 or 2016 games, but this history has caused the IOC to show disinterest.
freeman too:
I think your special effects idea, instead of expensive construction, is brilliant.
A further development could then be to have competitors enter their virtual selves and avoid all that expensive travel and accommodation.
Finally, we could turn the whole thing into a virtual. reality show for the masses.
And best is that all the real athletes could still enjoy the fresh air on their local track.
Put CCTV units in all the accommodation quarters. The uncensored vision of the greatest athletes in the world copulating like bunnies will be the greatest reality TV in the history of the genre. It may even recoup some of the costs by showing something that people want to watch.
“A vast harnessing of common belief,” is as concise a definition of the goal of populist politics, and the blood-watered pastures of fascism and communism beyond, as I have ever heard.
That, put very shortly, is what is wrong with the Olympics. Sport doesn’t much interest me, but as long as it stays part of the entertainment business, I don’t mind. When it is an instrument of politics then we all ought to worry. The writer has his uses.
“If we cannot rise to these occasions, we should not have bid for the games.”
Who’s this “we” paleface?
“the writer has his uses” – well yes Guy, if you mean when Andrew O’Hagan is for something it is senible to be against it, and when he is against something it is sensible to be for it.
But I do not know of anyone who needs such a guide.
Although you could mean that Mr O’Hagan writes so badly that he undermines support for any position he supports (I agree that this is useful).
I am told that Bill Gates served a similar function in Washington State politics.
He could always be counted on to give money to the leftist side in a referendum campaign. Thus giving antileftist a campaign point “voters, do not let Gates buy you” and dividing the leftists (some of whom hated getting help from the then richest capitalist in the world).
All good fun.