Olympics begin.......yeah, whatever.

There's a feeling in the British media that come 2012 the apathy shown (if indeed you can actually show apathy) towards the Beijing Olympics will have turned into a swelling of national pride and we will all take to the streets as one and praise Sir Seb and his cohorts for blessing us with such a spectacle. Personally I think the only people we will be praising will be the small army of Polish construction workers who will have been working twenty five hours a day for eight days a week for the next four years to complete the Olympic village.

Of course we want it to be a success, if only because the alternative will result in such a crushing blow to the national psyche that we will never bid for a major sporting event again. The French of course have every thing in place already should London decide that they can't make the deadline and Paris has to step in. That's not because those sneaky cheese eating surrender monkey's have been undertaking huge civil projects on the quiet, no it's because they already assume, and quite correctly in my view, that if you want to be the best then you must at least start at the ground and work upwards by offering good facilities at grass roots level and then building on that.

Paris could take the Olympics tomorrow, everything is in place with the exception of the athletes village and the land is already set-a-side and the cleared should there be a problem with London. Look at the sailing facilities for example, Weymouth and Portland are unique in the U.K for having the highest and fastest tide ranges, Portland is also connected to the mainland by one single carriageway road that gets clogged up every Saturday in the summer holidays, the railway line from Poole to Weymouth is not geared for massive train movements and the Weymouth by-pass runs through a council estate for part of its length! La Rochelle on the other hand is a world class venue for sailing regattas, it already hosts international sailing events and is ready now.

I hope that the credit-crunch and the impending recession doesn't mean that London 2012 will end up as some half arsed attempt at impressing the world that good old Blighty can still do things 'properly'. Let's have a three week celebration of Britishness, but without Chas and Dave and 'knees up Gordon Brown' being part of the party. We don't really take sport seriously in this country, it still has the faint whiff of 'jolly hockey sticks', 'play up and play the game' and the unmistakable aroma of deep heat being rubbed into aching limbs. I've become aware recently of how much resentment there is to organised sport in England and as somebody who has found sport an outlet for all of his life, in one way or another, I've been shocked by the open hostility to holding the games in the U.K in 2012.

Let's hope it all comes good, that the doom merchants are wrong and that Mags and Six enjoy being part of the army of volunteers.