Olympic grandstanding: politicising sport ahead of Paris 2024

As the Paris 2024 Summer Olympics begins over in France on Friday, some sport-averse members of the public like me, irritated by the endless hype and wall-to-wall disruption of the usual television schedules, may be minded to recall the English novelist Will Self’s blasé dismissal of the whole expensive circus prior to the London 2012 Games as a mere “festival of running and jumping”.

If only it were so. Today, the entire thing seems about to be redesigned to become an exercise in what might aptly be termed “political medalling”.

Ahead of the Games’ start, former Olympic rower Dame Katherine Grainger, who is now chairwoman of UK Sport, a Government-funded body with responsibility for subsidising likely medal-winning athletes, appeared in British media, boasting about how, during 2024, thanks to her own best efforts, “What we will remember at Paris will not just be the personal best [of any given athlete] or the medals or the moments of inspiration,” but the hectoring political and identitarian messages said sportsmxn and sportswxmen will be being officially encouraged to deliver as soon as they step down from the podium before the TV cameras.

This is not about individual competitors having individual opinions, and being able to express them individually, away from the stadiums; that’s just free speech. Instead, this is about athletes as a whole being subsidised by taxpayer-backed bodies to do the same on a quasi-official, corporate basis, which is qualitatively different.

So, what kind of things will Britain’s successful medallists henceforth be being urged to talk about? According to Dame Grainger: “Athletes have found their voice and found a platform … and that’s something we should support. It can be sustainability, it can be accessibility, it can be gender rights – it is loads of different areas that are important in society.” Just so long as they happen to be politically acceptable ones, of course: if speaking out about “gender rights” is so important, will concerned female swimmers be urged by the likes of Grainger to hold up large signs saying “Lia Thomas Is Not a Woman, So Keep Him and His Penis Out Of My Changing Room”? I sincerely doubt it.

Prize fools

Maybe one genuinely directly relevant issue social justice-promoting athletes could bring up would be the likely impact of looming budget-cuts at UK Sport which, as revealed earlier this year, may lead to the organisation cutting as many as 25 percent of its jobs during the coming funding-cycle leading up to the next 2028 Games in Los Angeles.

UK Sport has invested around £305m in its athletes for Paris 2024, but estimates that, due to inflation, it will need £360m just to maintain current support-levels for LA 2028. Therefore, as a report in The Daily Telegraph back in April put it: “It is felt that UK Sport cannot make a serious plea for additional public funds if they have not themselves made savings and shown that they are working as efficiently as possible. Individual elite sports are also being asked to make savings. An e-mail to stakeholders within the sector cites the need to make a ‘credible case to Government’.”

Perhaps, then, some disadvantaged gold medal-winner whose own funding is due to be cut sometime soon could use their valuable voice as a social change-maker to ask Dame Katherine Grainger and her fellow high-ups in UK Sport why precisely they are wasting the body’s increasingly scarce money on something which has nothing whatsoever to do with what is supposed to be its sole core purpose of efficiently funnelling public cash directly to people who can run really fast and jump over unreasonably tall things in an efficient and prize-winning fashion?

UK Sport’s likely response to such criticism, however, would be to calmly explain that, in our modern DEI era of inclusivity and progressive purpose, it no longer does have only the one core purpose at all. According to an online single-page summary of UK Sport’s “2021-31 Strategic Plan”, the organisation has three main stated ambitions: 

Of those, only one actually has anything to do with sport properly speaking at all: the other two are purely and explicitly political. At least UK Sport still lists winning actual medals as its number one priority, though, I suppose – for now, anyway. Once the number of medals rolling in Team GB’s way begins to severely decline due to finding cuts, the situation may find itself reversed. As such, UK Sport cannily provide themselves with some rhetorical leeway to still claim success on non-sporting grounds even should the team return home from Paris or LA almost empty-handed:

 What is this “longer term, holistic view of success”, precisely? Diversifying away from old-fashioned and exclusionary definitions of achievement, like winning medals, and pivoting instead to far more inclusive and equitable (and cheaper) definitions instead, such as “driving positive change” and “making a social impact”? It would seem so.

On the wrong track

In 2023, ahead of the planned review of its forthcoming funding-cycle, UK Sport launched a new programme, “Powered for Purpose”, which aimed to transform athletes from humble hop-skip-and-jumpers into “vital role models for our communities” instead. In a laudatory appraisal of this scheme for the PoliticsHome website – not SportsHome or The Athletic, do note – this certainly won approval from Kim Leadbeater MP, the then-Chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Sport, who argued that it was vital for UK Sport’s new scheme to demonstrate to the general British public the hitherto almost unrecognised fact that women and girls were also able to play sport, and not only men:

“We have such talent at all levels in this country, but our elite athletes are national heroes and ambassadors of our vital sports and leisure sector. Women athletes can face additional challenges including period poverty and the lack of equality in pay, opportunities and even changing facilities. I’m delighted that recent successes by our elite athletes have inspired a growing number of people to become more active and to dream of reaching the top.”

Leadbeater’s fellow cretin on the All-Party Group, Caroline Nokes MP, agreed:

“Elite athletes working to make a difference in their local communities should be celebrated. We know from the Committee’s evidence sessions on sexism and inequality in football there is still a lot to be done to root out harmful cultures in sport and make it an inclusive place for all. I am pleased many important equalities issues will be given a further platform through this initiative.”

GB track cyclist Georgia Holt was cited by UK Sport as one of the prime examples of the new breed of athlete intended to be pumped out on an industrial scale by their Powered For Purpose plan:

“With social media, people are realising that there is more to athletes than training or a gold medal. That doesn’t diminish what a gold medal means to me, but you might relate more to what I say on active travel, period poverty, or para-inclusion. I want people to follow me on that journey as well as my athletic one.”

But what if they don’t want to accompany Georgia on this “journey”? Can’t they just be allowed to watch her riding her special bike around in big circles repeatedly until someone eventually wins? Apparently not. Since 2022-23, when the first Powered For Purpose pilot scheme began with a few hand-selected participants (the most malleable and already reliably left-wing ones, presumably), UK Sport have been pumping out robotic testimonies from the successfully converted.

According to Paralympic swimmer Grace Harvey, for example:

"I’m really excited to be part of the programme. I applied because I’m really passionate about oral health and increasing education but I didn’t know where to start from when actioning and implementing social change. I hope to learn how to go about becoming a social change-maker and translating my passions into something constructive that can actually enhance the lives of others."

I don’t know, but I’m guessing that means Grace wants you and your kids to brush your teeth properly every night before you all go to bed.

 

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On yer bike, love

Eilish McColgan, a Commonwealth Games gold-medallist in the 10,000m, meanwhile, wants everybody to gather round the podium and listen to fascinating stories about her periods:

“The positive reaction to my decision to start a conversation about the impact of periods and my menstrual cycle on my training and performance was really heartening. Sharing my own experience with women both in sport and across society, listening to other people’s experience and hopefully encouraging other people to speak out is one of the best things I ever did … It is really encouraging to see that the British public so strongly support athletes who want to champion important causes and speak out about issues they feel strongly about, and I know that younger athletes will feel more confident in sharing their experiences.”

Not everyone wants to “share the experience” of young female athletes menstruating, though. Some would far rather they kept that kind of thing wholly to themselves. Nonetheless, UK Sport justify this on the grounds that, according to some research they commissioned from their supposedly threadbare funding-chest, “Two in three UK adults (66%) believe that athletes have a role to play in championing causes they believe in and raising awareness of social issues.”

Yet, in their PR material promoting this data, strangely enough, UK Sport don’t provide the actual question asked of survey participants to elicit this response. I would imagine it would have been phrased something along the lines of “Do you think sportspeople should be allowed to champion important matters close to their hearts?”, which may raise automatic images of them raising money for the homeless or babies with cancer. If the question had been phrased more honestly instead as “Do you think public money should be used to professionally train female cyclists to randomly lecture you about their menarche?” I suspect the percentage who answered “Yes” may have been rather smaller than the stated 66 percent.

There is no apparent limit to the number of niche social concerns that the future athletes of Great Britain will be professionally qualified to address. One trainee has even decided to jump aboard the bandwagon of something called “bed poverty“, which simply means someone not being able to afford to buy a bed for some reason. If that is really now to be considered an actual “thing”, you could literally just priorly append any given concrete noun to the word “poverty” and create an infinitude of new social justice causes to be righted by Olympians: couch poverty, cushion poverty, curtain poverty, cupboard poverty – and that’s just the items of home furnishing beginning with the letter “c”.

They can take a running jump

What precisely is the Powered By Purpose programme? You already know without reading it, but if you insist upon doing so, its so-called “executive summary” is available online here. Basically, it is a six-month faux-academic programme of predictably emetic and generic Oprah Winfrey-fied mental-and-moral-health discourse involving the following vital pedagogical methods:

But what are the valuable learning outcomes for the students involved? Importantly, Olympians come away with greater knowledge of certain environmentalism-related aims endorsed by no less an authority than the United Nations:

But aren’t “sustainable development goals” completely extraneous to the field of professional sport? No, because, increasingly, the actual sporting element of UK Sport’s remit appears to be going to be considered little more than a petty means towards a far greater political end. After completing the six-month Maoist Struggle Session, the Powered By Purpose summary boasts that:

How many of them still identify themselves as being athletes, I wonder? To be fair, some of the issues taken up by the participants following exposure to the course are both genuinely worthy and directly sport-related: Paralympians “lobbying a university for enhanced disability gym access and equipment”, for example, or using their expertise to help “training of hospital physiotherapists in how to introduce disability sport to people with recent spinal injuries.” When 66 percent of the British public answered “Yes” to whether or not Olympians should be championing social causes, I strongly imagine this is the kind of thing they had in mind, not patronising lectures about menstruation or “bed poverty”.

Bad sports

It should not surprise us that UK Sport have gone down this path, however, as their Powered By Purpose programme was not developed in-house by themselves, but put out to tender to an outside outfit, the True Athlete Project (TAP), who provide bespoke “Becoming Leaders in Creating Social Change Through Sport” workshop programmes for spendthrift international sporting federations.

TAP’s basic core three-pronged strategy is defined on their website as follows:

  • Embody the change we want to see by living and breathing the True Athlete Project ethos of openness, inclusivity, passion, and kindness.
  • Deliver programmes for governing bodies, coaches and athletes of all sports, and at all levels of sport, from grassroots to Olympic and Paralympic.
  • Influence the sporting sector toward a greater appreciation of the value of a holistic approach to sport.

Just in case you didn’t notice, the first letter of each of those three prongs spells DEI – Diversity, Equity, Inclusion – which tells you everything you need to know here.

TAP is the creation of Englishman Sam Parfitt, who moved to the US to pursue a career in tennis, before injuries led to “a desperate mental health struggle” which led to him developing a “novel” new sports-training programme for “at-risk Hispanic immigrant youth” and others, which “aimed to shift perceptions about what it means to be an ‘athlete’ away from the win-at-all-costs approach that pervades both elite and youth sport.”

What did being an “athlete” (the inverted commas are Sam’s own) now mean, then, if not winning? Apparently, it now meant “parkour, mindfulness, sports poetry, tai-ji, studying sport and peace and learning about heroes like Muhammad Ali”.

As is well-known, Ali used his initial sporting success to become something of a 1960s and ‘70s social campaigner, protesting against things like racism and the war in Vietnam. Therefore, according to TAP, all athletes should seek to follow Ali’s fine example likewise, via the following means:

“We are not satisfied with the status quo. So we have developed a range of programs which develop ‘true’ athletes, who understand sport is an act of mind, body and soul with repercussions far beyond the win/loss column. With an innovative blend of mental skills training, mentoring and more, we make sport fun and meaningful … we unleash the power of sport!”

As Ali famously floated like a butterfly and stung like a bee, TAP’s logo is a butterfly itself, on the following grounds:

“Our logo reflects the profound transformation of an individual, and the dynamic effect of that transformation on the wider world. Our butterfly logo captures the essence of The True Athlete Project perfectly – ‘to transform the world, one true athlete at a time.’ The butterfly is a universal symbol of transcendence, awakening and peace.”

Somehow, I don’t think vomiting this kind of rubbish was quite how Muhammad Ali himself managed to become “The Greatest”. Indeed, if I recall the matter correctly, Mr. Ali actually did so by skilfully yet very violently punching his opponents’ heads in. 

Jumping through the hoops

How is it that, in a time when public cash for Olympic sports seems to be about to become more and more squeezed across the UK, the very body charged with ensuring success in such fields is wasting funds on unnecessary nonsense like this? Perhaps it is because, in our current day and age, those running UK Sport understand full well where the true priorities of their political masters lie – in imposing the all-important, and all-encompassing, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion agenda upon every last topic under the sun, no matter how utterly irrelevant.

MPs like Kim Leadbeater and Caroline Nokes sitting on the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Sport don’t actually care about sport as sport at all, they just care about it as a convenient vehicle for their own brand of woke political propaganda, endlessly obsessed as it is with total sporting non-issues like race, sexuality, mental health, feminism, queerness, overly-expensive beds and periods.

Unfortunately, therefore, whatever those running UK Sport actually think about such tedious matters, in order to hang onto what future funding they can, administrators now have no other real option than to comply with the wishes of the Leadbeaters and Nokes of this world and pretend that creating “social change-makers” is what professional sport is really all about, not glory, winning, or the humble joy of simply taking part.

Maybe one day, to take Will Self’s cynical anti-Olympics quote from 2012 and turn it upside-down for a moment, the Games can go back to just being a boring old festival of running and jumping again?   


Are you looking forward to watching the Olympics?   


Steven Tucker is a UK-based writer with over ten books to his name. His next, Hitler’s & Stalin’s Misuseof Science, comparing the woke pseudoscience of today to the totalitarian pseudoscience of the past, willbe published in summer 2023.

Image credit: Bigstock


 

Showing 6 reactions

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  • Peter Faehrmann
    commented 2024-07-31 13:12:49 +1000
    Hey Dave, I think Celion Dion, bless her soul, is (French) Canadian.
  • David Page
    commented 2024-07-29 02:38:20 +1000
    Jürgen, are all revolutions bad? Did the French have no legitimate grievances with the crown? What about the American revolution? Just say no to what? Freedom? A revolution can end badly, but it starts as a reaction to injustice. And sometimes they turn out great. I wish you would explain yourself more.
  • Jürgen Siemer
    commented 2024-07-28 23:51:29 +1000
    Just say no!

    Unfortunately, the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games in Paris were politicized in a way, I assume, most of us were not expecting in our worst nightmares. The opening ceremony conveyed blasphemic and pro-revolutionary messages to the masses of the world, in a way probably never sent before.

    Viewers are generally in an applaude-modus on such an event. We welcome the young sportsmen and women from all over the world and wish them all a good time. But then by inserting those blasphemic and pro-revolutionary displays into the show, they were trying to “steal” the applause of the people for those evil messages.

    Sometimes, it is necessary to not see only the “goodness” in nature and in human beings.

    Sometimes, you are forced to say “No”. As Christians, we must not acknowledge or even give the impression that we acknowledge such grave sins.

    I sincerely hope that the Pope and our bishops now publically and forcefully condemn those acts.

    Just say No!
  • David Page
    commented 2024-07-28 12:38:20 +1000
    I might point out here that right-wing political cynicism sucks the joy out of everything. I didn’t watch the entire opening but I was enthralled by Celine Dione’s stand out performance. Celine Dione in her first performance since being diagnosed with a neurological disorder excelled. She sang the Piaf song, Hymne à l’amour (Song of Love). She did a great job. It is one of my favorite songs. Piaf (The Sparrow) is one of my favorite singers. And Celine did her, and France, proud. There is magic in the world. Can you not see it?
  • mrscracker
    I guess branching out into the Olympics provides more job security for the DEI industry.
  • Steven Tucker
    published this page in The Latest 2024-07-25 11:45:17 +1000