Legacy of the Games vanished fast as Bolt

WHAT were you doing a year ago this weekend? I spent most of it in a sulk, having f ailed to get tickets for some now forgotten Commonwealth sport – table tennis, possibly.

That said, last year’s Glasgow Commonwealth Games were fabulous, with stars such as sprinter Usain Bolt, pictured. Even for those who didn’t get to witness the sport or the ceremonies in person, there was something transformative about the experience. It was a respite from the rough and tumble of the referendum, and a chance (depressingly rare these days) for Scotland to feel like a united country.

Glasgow put on its best bib and tucker, turned on its mega-watt smile and gave the world a show to remember. It was so good, you could almost forgive the terrible Day-Glo outfits the Scotland Team were shoe-horned into for the opening ceremony. Almost.

A year on though? I’m not so sure. This week it emerged that a genius at Glasgow City Council had erected a bus shelter slap bang in the middle of a cycle path… to the Sir Chris Hoy velodrome. This came hot on the heels of a vociferous national campaign to reinstate that heartattack-in-a-pastry – the macaroni pie. Dearie me. Not quite what the G a me s chiefs had in mind when they talked of legacy.

There have, of course, been benefits – not least the £740million boost to the Scottish econ- omy, a raft of first-class sports venues, an athletes’ village turned into private homes and a number of sports-led school initiatives.

But a legacy should ultimately be about something deeper than a few pockets of affordable housing or a smattering of school projects. It needs to be about a change in DNA, in our very culture, the sort of thing that can take generations to fix.

The sad truth is that a year on from the Games, Scotland still has a major obesity crisis on its hands. This is a country where almost one in four pupils starting primary school is overweight or obese. Fat five-year- olds usually stay fat for life. Imagine that – condemned to a life of obesity before you’ve learned to read. This is the fate of almost a quarter of Scotland’s children.

In North Ayrshire, one in three children is overweight or obese, and across the country, only half of primary school pupils walk to school.

I have seen the NHS up close over the past six months and it seems to me that the sick man of Europe is still very, very ill. Our hospitals are overcrowded and our creaking NHS is struggling to cope. While a year ago the streets of the country’s biggest city thrummed with the excitement of the Games, I defy you to walk through central Glasgow this weekend and not find yourself confronted with morbid obesity or open drug addiction. None of these things can be tackled overnight and none will be solved by a couple of weeks of world-class sport. But the fact that there was recently a national campaign to save the macaroni pie, led by the First Minister, suggests that as a nation we still have an awful long way to go.