Barbelith Underground > Games & Gameplay

Sport in this country is appallingly underfunded and if having the Olympics means the government starts to care about it, then so be it.

But all that money is going to be poured into the Olympics not children who need to exercise. They're estimating that it's going to cost £2 billion, which frankly sounds like a vast underestimation considering that Wembley alone is eating up approximately £750 million. The government will care about its profile and possibly about making this a bearable experience for London but this isn't anything to do with grassroots sport. The likelihood of a government that has happily sold off school fields giving any money to more sporting budgets when they're building an Olympic village, stadium, upgrading existing facilities and desperately trying to work out how to best employ increased transportation is pretty low. I just can't be idealistic about this because I don't seriously think the country's going to get much out of it, except some small enthusiasm for sport in children... and not all children. I think if this had happened when I was at school I would have wanted to shoot myself in the head.

If you live in this city you know that the Circle line breaks down as soon as the temperature hits 26 degrees, there's no air conditioning on overcrowded tubes, the undercarriages of trains catch fire in the heat, tourists can't work out the signs in stations, bendy buses slow down the roads and are generally too crowded at 3pm in the afternoon in the winter, three tube lines and the Metropolitan line are shut down every weekend for necessary maintenance work, the line current on the Northern line goes down every fourth day in the rush hour. They can sort the tube out if they shut it down for a month. They can't do that, hence the doom but these problems happen on a normal day, so what's going to happen when there are thousands of foreign people in the city. My point is that these are problems that they can't fix unless the government shuts London down just before and during this event and that would leave it in debt... I mean £2 billion my arse. Just stick "cost of olympics" into google.

The best thing that come out of this is that The London Development Agency (LDA) estimates that the Games will leave a legacy of up to 9,000 new homes in the Olympic zone, more than half of them in the Olympic Village itself. And maybe someone will actually internationalise the tube a bit and install some foreign language signs.

Olympics 2012