Regeneration games? Not likely.

2012 is the great summer of sport—the greatest since the last great summer of sport. Which was probably last summer or the summer before. In fact, the really unusual thing these days would be a summer without much sport. And forget the back page, it’s front page stuff nowadays.

Come to think of it, it’s all over the business pages and social affairs columns too. London 2012—the “regeneration games” that will “inspire a generation” is another example in a long line of examples where sport is being pressed into service for wider political, economic and social agendas. We have come to believe that sport will make us healthy and wealthy—even good and peaceful.

If you listen to some, then the Olympics will deliver a major boost to Britain at a time of economic uncertainty. Yet no recent Olympic Games has produced proven significant economic benefits to the host city or country. Chinese commentators have described the effects of the huge investment in the Beijing Games as negligible. Eight years after the Athens 2004 Games, 21 of the 22 Olympic venues remain abandoned. The Sydney Olympics tripled its budget and the former Chief Planner for the Sydney Games has said that the host city should have focused more broadly on a legacy programme for the Olympics site and that “Sydney is now paying the price.” Why should London be any different?



Of course, you could see it as economic stimulus (curious for this government to be so committed to it)—the official figure in terms of public investment is £9.3 billion (once you factor in the impacts on London’s “ordinary” economy, it will be much higher). The economic benefits that accrue from such mega-events are notoriously hard to measure, but London 2012 will most likely be “extractive.”

The issue here is not just a cost-benefit analysis of sport mega-events. The economic justification for sport rests on pervasive assumptions that sport should have to do some kind of useful work to justify itself. It’s the protestant work ethic writ large across our culture. It must make us better people, fitter and healthier. Across a range of themes, under-delivery always follows over-promise.

There is hard evidence to suggest, for instance, that participation in sport can lead not to moral improvement, but to anti-social outcomes. And in spite of inflated rhetoric around sport as tool for peacemaking (there is a UN Office on Sport for Development and Peace) it can also clearly offer a patina for abuses of power—one need look no further than the furore over the this year’s Bahraini grand prix to see that. The government’s sport participation agenda—one of the nation’s key strategies in the war on obesity—has had only very limited success, in spite of hundreds of millions of pounds of public investment. Only seven million (or just 16.3 per cent) adults in England are reportedly active (participating in sport three times a week for 30 minutes at moderate intensity) in 2010-11, down marginally on 2008-09 figures. 17 of the 21 governing bodies in receipt of this money saw a decrease in once-a-week participation.

It’s tempting to think that we’re not pulling the right levers, or to argue that sport policy needs to change. We should avoid that temptation. What we need is a deeper appreciation of what sport is and what it can (and can’t) do. Philosophers of sport have rightly complained when societies have tried to twist sport to ulterior motives, be that economic growth, moral improvement, or a healthy society. Its affective power makes it appealing for politicians, and easier to believe inflated claims. But its effective power, its power to achieve things, is much more limited than we like to think. All we succeed in doing, in the end, is making sport less fun than it should be.

In this summer of sport, the best thing we can do for sport is call out those who want to use it to change society or rebuild the economy, and then enjoy it for what it is—entirely unnecessary.

Paul Bickleyis senior researcher at the think tank Theos