Bread and Circuses

Yahoo News has published this report today, which is worth quoting here:

The design for the 2012 Olympic stadium, based on a sunken bowl, has been unveiled.

Olympic organising committee chairman Lord Coe described it as a "stadium for a completely new era that will be inspiring and have a lasting legacy".
It has 25,000 permanent seats sunken into the bottom, with a layer of 55,000 temporary seats above and a roof that will cover two-thirds of all spectators.
Outside the stadium will be pods filled with facilities for spectators, such as food stalls.
Key to the design of the £496 million venue in Stratford, east London, is that it must shrink from an 80,000-seat capacity venue during the Games to one of 25,000 seats afterwards.
It will then become a multipurpose venue used for athletics and other sporting and community events, but no anchor tenant has yet been found.
Original cost estimates did not include VAT and inflation.
John Armitt, chair of the Olympic Delivery Authority, said: "Nearly £500 million is a lot of money in anyone's terms but it is the budget and we are determined to work within that.
"If there is a requirement for any extra, we have a contingency within the scheme covering this as a whole and we will use some of that,

A stadium in the shape of a 'sunken bowl' to symbolise a nation going down the pan, presumably, but the item is amusing for the cutting edge, contemporary argot (and the obligatory vacuous statement from the vacuous Lord Coe). The 'arse covering' caution of John Armitt, 'chair' of the Olympic Delivery Authority, is also something to savour and he will certainly deserve the now inevitable peerage, should he deliver sufficient olympic within the specified budget, especially since he appears to be one of the few shovelling out public money by the McGravy Train load to be aware that five hundred million pounds is indeed a lot of money for a twenty five thousand seat depression in the marshy ground of East London.

For those, like Gruff, who find spectator sports nothing more than a pointless exercise the Olympics can never be anything more than an inexcusable waste of money. The utter irrelevance of the whole sorry spectacle is confirmed by the importance that would-be 'super-powers' place on it. What is the value of national prestige if it depends entirely on one swimmer or runner or show jumper completing a course one hundredth of a second faster than another, one gymnast demonstrating an entirely subjective superiority in limb-dislocatingly tortuous movement or someone throwing a spear some fractions of a metre further than any other if one's country has, for instance, one of the highest prison populations or levels of child poverty? It is difficult to avoid the suspicion that official support for the Olympic farce is concerned more with distracting public attention from the grim reality outside the stadia walls than providing 'the community' with state of the art sporting facilities.