Fat chance of a sporting legacy from the Games
The big fat lie of the Glasgow 2014 ‘legacy’ has been laid bare. Remember the excess and excitement of it all?
A Commonwealth Games budget which drained the taxpayer of £563million, roughly £200m more than the original pitch.
Not one expense spared with a £45.8million back-up budget blown to boot.
But here’s the brass neck of it all. Fewer Glaswegians are now playing sport or taking any form of exercise than before Usain Bolt rolled into town.
Obesity levels are also rising yet the Scottish Government is patting itself on the back for an increase in ... recreational walking.
Our head-in-the-sand Minister for Public Health and Sport, Aileen Campbell, said the rise in walking is behind an ambition to make Scotland the “world’s first Daily Mile nation”.
Another vapid, nothing slogan to disguise the reality that more than one in three Scottish teenagers are overweight or obese – and it’s a quarter when it comes to Primary One pupils.
Walking? What happened to the ‘legacy’? Local authority budgets are being savaged and net spending on sport-related services are falling.
Let’s take a stroll down memory lane of our government’s sporting achievements since 2014.
Cost of participation in sport, hikes in pitch hire and the lack of access to decent facilities have excluded many. Daily Mile nation indeed.
It’s time to call out the broken promises of a Games which Holyrood’s Health and Sport Committee admitted has seen “no current evidence of an active legacy”.
Football wasn’t on the menu of this two-week sporting feast but as a nation we’re hanging up our boots in droves.
Numbers of players in amateur and boys club levels are said to have declined so much that it’s in danger of slipping down the ranking as our national sport.
For the record only eight percent of our people play football on a monthly basis.
The Scottish Government were wrong to assume that hosting a major event would enhance participation levels.
Figures from Manchester and Melbourne, which hosted the Games in 2002 and 2006, showed that the numbers of people taking part in sport actually fell.
A recent study showed that 47 percent of Glaswegians had taken part in a sporting activity which included walking within a one-month period. But if you take away walking from the equation then that figure falls to just 17 per cent.
It’s a huge contributing factor to why Glasgow has the highest mortality rate in the UK and why Glaswegians have a 30 percent higher risk of dying before they are 65, a premature death.
Just like the thousands of mattresses, beds, wardrobes and chairs which were left to rot instead of being distributed to some of Glasgow’s poorest people as outlined in the Games legacy, it was stitch-up job.
Sporting clubs of all kinds are folding weekly due to lack of funds as councils crank up the cost of facilities.
And that’s the national scandal which exposes the Commonwealth Games as a political vanity project of sound bites and empty sentiment.
Sorry Aileen but it’s got to be better than the ‘Daily Mile’ and the next time the tender comes up for another sporting spectacular we should run one.