What the commentators said
“Imagine a country that isn’t very successful, but wants to boost its image in the world,” said Peter Hitchens in The Mail on Sunday. Its economy is “rocky”, its cities “grubby”, its schools poor. So this country spends huge amounts of money on winning medals, choosing sports where the competition is weak. “The country I am thinking of is East Germany.” But doesn’t it apply equally to Britain today? “We used to ridicule the communists for this,” said Simon Jenkins in The Guardian. Now we’ve joined them. They call it “financial doping”. It’s no surprise that it works. “Who needs to cheat with drugs when medals go to money?”
Come, come, said Martin Kettle in The Guardian. “The truth is that the Olympics is good national value.” The £350m that we have put into the Olympic effort since 2012 is “a tiny proportion of total public spending over the same period”. And it creates all sorts of benefits: inspiring people to take part in sports; making people from all sorts of backgrounds feel a part of Britain; creating a general “feel-good factor”. All the big economic powers invest in the Olympics, said Dominic Sandbrook in the Daily Mail: just look at the medal tables. Shouldn’t it be a source of pride that we do it well? And the old sneer, that we are only any good at specialised “sitting-down sports” such as rowing, cycling and sailing, is no longer true, said Jim White in The Daily Telegraph. Hockey, swimming, diving, running, triathlon, boxing, gymnastics, tennis, golf and taekwondo are not exactly “sedentary”.
For Brazil, though, the games were less of a success, said Jonathan Watts in The Observer. In the midst of an economic crisis, it has spent billions on stadiums though it “can barely afford wages for doctors and teachers”; while a big security presence in the Olympic areas led to chaos in the favelas. Yet the Games will certainly leave a positive legacy, said Beatriz Garcia on The Conversation. Tourism has boomed. The run-down areas chosen as venues for the Games have been rehabilitated. And thanks in large part to the Olympic infrastructure effort, 63% of the population now have access to public transport, up from 18% seven years ago.