Olympic medal haul worth every penny

Is Team GB’s huge Olympic medal haul worth the money? Much ire has been aimed this week at the £347 million of lottery funding which has led to a huge raft of medals, but I’d argue the cost is worth it. If kids can’t be inspired to compete in sport after watching the finest athletes on the planet, then nothing will stir them from their electronic-gadget-induced torpor – and that couch potato laziness is stacking up a host of health issues for them and our NHS in future.

Some of the venom has been aimed at the fact that some of the sports are apparently for toffs and rich folk.

Someone once complained to me that the kids who cycled at the Dundee Velodrome all came from middle-class parents.

Paying £4 for a Saturday morning session got them a track bike and helmet as well as their coaching; that’s the price of a burger and chips, and much healthier.

The critic also forgot that middleclass parents pay taxes, too, and that two of the cyclists at the club who have gone on to achieve great things had a dad who was a hard-grafting scaffolder, who was an inspirational figure for his offspring and others at the track with his discipline and work ethic.

Brought up as a Dundee scheme boy I have a deep dislike of inverted snobbery, and the barb about the cyclists was just that: misplaced and badly misjudged.

Where would the critics rather the money went?

We already pour millions down a black hole in the failed attempt to stem a tide of drug addiction and drunkenness.

I think it’s a much better idea and more beneficial for society to get kids hooked on sport.

Investing in top-class facilities and top-class athletes, and at the same time ensuring there is a pyramid from the bottom up with coaching and facilities for the many, are not mutually exclusive ambitions. Both can, and should be, provided in one of the wealthiest economies in the world.

And spare me the guff that the poor are subsidising the better-off by buying a lottery ticket. People buy the lottery ticket of their own free will, and only a mindset which reeks of arrogant intellectual snobbery would argue otherwise in peddling such pompous, paternalistic pap.

I’m not even interested in the nationalistic argument surrounding the Olympics. It’s the sheer bloodymindedness of individual athletic endeavour and sweat and toil and determination on show which captures my affections.

Athletes who train day and night year-in, year-out, mostly in sports where there is very scant if any financial reward – who put careers on hold, sacrifice the normal everyday enjoyments like having a beer and a late-night kebab in their quest for glory – are worthy of admiration.

It’s a sacrifice which most folk could not contemplate and if it takes lottery funding to help make it all happen, then that is a good thing in my book.

The joy and despair and sheer human drama of Rio are worth every penny. Only killjoys would deny it.

The joy and despair and sheer human drama of Rio are worth every penny

Picture: Getty. The joy of winning an Olympic medal: Sally Conway won judo bronze, adding to the huge GB medal haul which must surely inspire generations to come.