'We must end this something for nothing culture' said David Cameron, albeit paraphrased heavily 'which is why all teachers should give up their free time to teach sports in schools.' The Conservatives have excelled in being the worst kind of spoilsports by actually spoiling sports. Quite an incredible feat to achieve whilst Team GB's™ incredible haul of Olympic™ Gold™ Medals™ has, for the first time in many years, pulled the country together to rejoice in soundly beating other countries in a competitive arena. So, to embrace this temporary climate of the United Kingdom actually being happy about something for once the government thought long and hard about how to make sure that the public wouldn't smile for too long. I mean, imagine that. What if, just what if, we all carried on this positive attitude brought on by winning and we all suddenly forgot that we have to be punished for millionaires dodging tax and bankers ruining everything? Urgh, the idea makes me shudder. But fear not, as that is unlikely to happen in a week where growth has hit a resounding 0%, meaning that plants and children will not get bigger for at least two years and many men will struggle with erections. If that wasn't enough, Cameron and Co have decided to remove the compulsory 120 minutes of sports per week in the schools' curriculum and instead decided that it would be better for our sedentary, obese nation if it was extra curricular and run by people who won't get paid to do it. Alongside this the sale of school sports fields continues, with a lovely juxtaposition of Cameron and Hunt saying that the culture of sports in education needs to change. What it seems children will be left with is having to willingly stay behind after school to partake in jumping up and down in the store cupboard of a privately owned block of flats. Why not just throw your Playstation 3s away now The Youth?
I'm not a sporty person. Up until recently, you would have been able to guess that in two main ways: 1) My rotund shape that suggests the only sports I'm good at is channel surfing and 2) if you tried to engage me in any conversation about anything remotely sport-like a glaze would form over my eyes as I tried to imagine bears eating your face to cheer me up. But this has changed. Since the Olympics™ began, despite cynicism of corporate vehicle behind the event and the ludicrousness of LOCOG™, I have sat on my arse and watched hours of events every single day. This hasn't at all helped with my sport like figure, but it has made me realise how exciting it is to watch impassioned people take part in the more interesting sports that TV shunned years ago with the death of Grandstand. It may be that I'm an idiot, and I find many of the Olympic™ events easier to understand than other sports. There's no confusion about legs before wickets or offsides, merely 'JUST RUN FASTER THAN HIM/HER! SWIM FASTER! BE BETTER!' and so in game banter becomes much more viable for someone like me. Whatever it is though, it's nice to actually feel interested and excited about someone else doing exercise. I know other people feel the same way too. Twitter is awash with comments on horse dancing, heavy frisbee throwing and many other events that would not normally get the time of day from the most ardent of sports fans. Then the games will end, telly will shun it all to focus on overpaid and largely disappointing footballers or people getting too much money to have no personality, and it will all dissipate.
Except for children. Children who have watched in awe as they gain new heroes such as Laura Trott or Greg Rutherford. You know, the ones who stood by that giant one-eyed penis monster but weren't scared? I wish there had been a London™ Olympics™ when I was at school and I may have decided to seek out doing more sport by myself. As it happened, there wasn't, and so my confidence in sports was only ever boosted by having to partake in school P.E lessons, many of which showed me that while our football team tended to do better if I was nowhere near the pitch and that I should be let nowhere near a large pointy javelin ever again for the safety of others, it turned out I was pretty good at badminton, oddly fine at basketball despite my diminutive stature and alright at cross country running. This led to me actually wanting to stay behind to play badminton or basketball. Not cross country running. There's something about doing that afterschool in the dark around North London that just didn't seem very safe.
I understand that not everyone is like me, but when the young are so vilified in today's society of limited future prospects I think many of them may need some sort of push to make them believe they can go on to do anything. This isn't even taking into account that most teachers I know don't have an ounce of time spare after marking, preparatory work and constantly having to understand all the petty and archaic changes to the system that Gove keeps insisting on. I don't know if you'd get the same level of commitment you could find at this years Olympics™ if all competitors had been taught by someone who was exhausted and distracted by other work they needed to do. There may well be hundreds of potential Mo Farrahs out there (not in a weird clone way) but will they willingly want to find out what it is they are good at when there isn't the requirement or facilities to do so? The only way I can see competitive sport in schools increasing is if pupils have to fight over the tiny bit of gravel they are allowed to run on the spot on in their tiny playground. I can't see that being a sport in Rio 2016 somehow. What I can see is that this 'golden summer' that Cameron keeps calling it, will quickly become a 'golden era' that we look back on as a fabled time, while the legacy of this government ensures it doesn't happen again for quite some time.