Are The Olympics Worth It
Honestly, I couldn’t care a monkeys about the Olympics. I won’t watch most of it on TV anyway and therefore it makes no difference whatsoever to me where it is staged. But the cost to the country at a time when our government is shutting down services all over the country does. And honestly, I can’t see us making anything out of this. I can just see it being a huge waste of financial resources at a time when we don’t have any to waste.
Comments (4)|1 Liked It
The Olympics have finally started after goodness knows how much hoo-ha about the Olympic Torch going throughout the country. I for one will be glad to finally hear the end of where the bleeding thing is going and how many crowds have turned out to meet it; I got so peeved with the entire thing I gave up on the radio and just put a CD in my car. But finally we may get to see where millions of our pounds are going which could quite usefully be put towards the National Health Care budget, or supporting children in care or for that matter medical research. And the question has to be – is it worth it? Is the amount of building projects, road changes and sheer financial burden actually worth the fact that we get to host a load of athletes running around showing off their stuff.
You see, in total I can see one heck of a lot of flaws to holding the Olympics in Britain and not that many benefits no matter how hard anyone tries to persuade me otherwise. People go on at me about the potential tourism benefits, business opportunities and how many more facilities will be built in order to make the games happen which will be of massive use and brilliant investments in later years. But honestly, I can’t see it. Likewise I can’t see how the United Kingdom holding the Olympic Games will make us any more popular with other countries than we are already; we will still lose the Eurovision Song Contest and I very much doubt that our reputation will change in the slightest. As far as tourism opportunities go surely we only have to look at Athens in order to see that’s a complete load of poppy cock; it took them years to get their tourism figures back to what they were prior to the games after having drastically falling. And as far as having the rest of the world thinking better of us for this I’d see this as an equal load of cock and bull; all it means is that you can waste millions of pounds on something that is going to be torn down in a matter of months. There’s no pride to it; it’s just poppy cocks showing off how much money we have in a period of time when we don’t actually have any money.
Any money which we sink into the infrastructure of the games is much like the complete shambles of the Millennium Dome; a fantastic idea in theory but a complete write off in practice. Half the structures will end up being torn down after being used solely for their purpose at the Olympics and then suddenly it’s realised that nothing else can actually be done with them. Anything that is actually managed to be used could probably have been built anyway and at much lower cost without the whole furore of the Olympics behind it and the need to try to impress the rest of the world. The rebuilding of certain areas of London is all well and good, but if it needed doing then it should be done for the populations sake and not the sake of a single event because again, at the end of the day what we are going to end up with is a load of stuff which has been built solely with thoughts of the event. When the shows over suddenly most of it will be completely useless and be more of a drain on society than the original area was.
On top of this the entire thing has made London unlivable in for the regular commuters and workers as complete priority goes to the Olympics. Roads have been changed for the Olympics and there are areas where the Average Joe can no longer go without fear of massive fines despite the fact that they pay their road tax, council tax and everything else like the rest of the country. There are 30 miles of VIP only lanes and an extra 109 miles of extra Olympics only lanes throughout London you can hardly blame the population for wanting to get up and scarper off for the duration of the events. The residents of London have to somehow get to work amongst all of this chaos and at the end of the day their employer isn’t going to accept the excuse that they couldn’t drive in due to the Olympics.
This is without mentioning the fact that the entire thing is entirely over budget. Some wise aleck at the beginning of this whole deal said that the entire thing would cost the country £2.37 billion, which in itself seems like one heck of a lot of money. But suddenly this figure is currently £9.3 billion that is actually been spent with some saying that the total figures at the end of the day could reach over £20 billion. Now I’m no maths genius, but even I can see that someone has made a huge mistake on the figures here.
Honestly, I couldn’t care a monkeys about the Olympics. I won’t watch most of it on TV anyway and therefore it makes no difference whatsoever to me where it is staged. But the cost to the country at a time when our government is shutting down services all over the country does. And honestly, I can’t see us making anything out of this. I can just see it being a huge waste of financial resources at a time when we don’t have any to waste.
Read more:
well written and thanks for share
I think you share a well written point of view. What I try to do is look at it through the eyes of the talented, focused participants. Thanks for sharing.
Thanks for this share.
I guess they are supposed to bring good relationships throughout the world, but it seems they rarely do much of that. Have to agree with you.