SPORTS UPDATE

ONE MAY DETECT A CERTAIN SYMMETRY in the British press at the moment due to its perhaps natural obsession with things Eastern, given that our good leader is at present being fêted in South Korea at the latest waste of money that is known as the G20 meeting. Nothing has ever come out of these meetings in terms of economic development or financial reform, and since Gordon Brown has retired to Scotland no one even bothers to talk about the absurd global warming issue that was at the top of the agenda for the last six meetings. This proves that governments have decided that it is more important to save banks than it is to save the planet.

THE SYMMETRY, HOWEVER, INVOLVES products made in China. On the one hand some of the more hard-line British journalists have become outraged at the fact that most of the official souvenirs for the 2012 Olympics in London are being made in China, tainted with a reputation for shoddiness; on the other hand we have the shock sale of a piece of XVIII Chinese porcelain being sold yesterday for a record amount of fifty-one million pounds, shoddy by no means.

IF PEOPLE ARE PREPARED to pay enormous amounts of money for a gaudy piece of kitsch which serves no purpose then that is obviously no one’s business other than their own, but the fact that most of the money being invested in the London Olympics is going to Chinese companies is clearly a scandal. And one that returns to play my idea that the Olympic Games should have a permanent home, rather like the Oscars.

IT MAKES NO SENSE TO INVEST SO MUCH MONEY in shifting these games from one place to another and it is utterly pointless to have athletic sports being played in Britain, where most young people have no interest in energetic physical action. We should allow our teenagers the right to benefit from their youth, giving them the chance to do what they really enjoy, such as hanging around wearing hoods and smoking cigarettes outside closed supermarkets, drinking beer from cans, spitting on the floor, listening to “rap” music on “headphones”, and lying to each other about their sexual conquests. Their only activity is when they occasionally have to run away from a police car and jump over a fence into someone’s garden.

(My picture shows the Great Britain 4 x 100 metres relay team in training before an international event in France.)