I used to be excited about the London Olympics. It was a measured, rational excitement (I don’t do giddy), but I was definitely looking forward to them. I was also happy to argue with those that said that they would be a waste of money, or doomed to fail, but in the last few months a tide of foul-smelling corporatism has slowly drowned my enthusiasm, and this week I realised that I wasn’t excited anymore.
Most of the great fetid wash is associated with the sponsorship of the games, an unseemly whoring out of venues, athletes and events. The quite mad levels of control around corporate sponsors and the use of logos is bad enough, but when that extends to restricting brands that the public can bring into the venue, or even the use of certain words (olympicspeak like ‘Gold’ and ‘Silver’) that small businesses around the country might use to join in with the celebration, then my inner Orwell gets twitchy.
Some of the stink comes from the pseudo-random ticket allocation, that leaves some people with handfuls of tickets and some with none, not to mention the staggering prices being asked for.
And then this week our own web team drew my attention to the draconian (and potentially unenforceable) rules around the olympic website itself. Rules which not only assert legal and commercial controls on all content shared by the site, but which also give ‘terms of use’ that include linking to it. The IOC has always been a bit stupid in their attitude towards digital and social media, but to extend this ignorance to the global web community in a way that threatens free speech? Blimey, its not exactly in the olympic spirit is it?
The total cost of London games is said to be as much as 11 billion pounds. Of that around 700 million pounds is raised from sponsorship, and around 500 million pounds is clawed back through ticket sales. That sounds to me like if we’d found another billion pounds or so, or just ways to reduce costs by about 10% we could have done things rather differently.
So let us try and imagine a better world, a world that is tantalisingly close.
In this world there is no corporate sponsorship. At all. Any business around the world is free to get into the olympic spirit. ‘Olympic burgers’ and ‘Gold Breakfasts’ can be freely sold from food vans and cafes across the country, local shops can run ‘Olympic discounts’ and base bargains on the performance of local athletes. Schools, colleges and clubs are free to use the olympic logo and run their own olympic events to excite and inspire.
Tickets are free. There is still a lottery (we can’t all go), but half the tickets are reserved for real fans, the people who support athletes all year round, or have season tickets for their local football teams, they are allocated through clubs and professional bodies. Best of all the seats you get are random, meaning that the poorest person could potentially get the premier position, right across from the finish line.
Finally there are no reporting restrictions. Sportsmen and women are free to share the experience of being right at the centre of the games, fans can upload images and share their memories freely. As a result London 2012 is the most open, transparent and joyful games in living memory.
UK taxpayers paid for around 93% of the London Olympics. For just 7% more we could have told these corporate bullyboys exactly where to shove their logos, rules and terms of use. We could have had that exciting world.
It would have been a billion pounds well spent.
David Millard 