Be Excellent To Each Other

Are you suggesting that the state should pay for people to live as they choose so they get to play sport?

I went to a fee-paying school and my parents aren't rich by any stretch of the imagination. I certainly was bundled out of the door to find a job once I'd finished college and decided uni wasn't for me.

But also, this! As much as it pains me to admit it, 99% of the private school people I've met (and I've met a fair few studying law) are bloody hard workers with their sights set on a career of hard work and supporting themselves. Sure, they get plenty of help during their studying years from their parents, and they might inherit a large chunk of cash someday, but they worked just as hard as I did. On the whole...

And that's not even taking into account the non-poshos who are privately educated as a result of grants or their working class parents just working really fucking hard to give their kids the best possible start.

Gove doesn't think it's important.

http://www.independent.co.uk/sport/olym ... 14903.html



The Olympics would be an ideal point to increase funding for sport in state schools. Unfortunately the current government appears to have the opposite priorities.

Tories being Tories!

My PE Lessons were shit. And I wasn't asked back on the athletics team as I ran my race, then got the bus home at the county championships. Nor was I allowed to defend my 1500m tile (I'd won it the previous three years, by a long, long way) as I wasn't around to 'qualify', being out of the country at the time. in the PE lesson after sports day, I beat the winning time by about 25 seconds, which was a rpetty decent "fuck you"! to all concerned, and never ran again.

EDIT: I think the people that beat me in the county race were half from state schools and half from private schools. I also suspect they ran the 1500m slight more often than the 4 times a year I did (it was boring)

There is a bit more context given in thst article...

Of course. That's why I didn't put those bits in the quote.

They were sick of you using the "photo finish" camera for your own narcissistic means!

Gold for Ali Brownlee in the triathlon!

Bronze for Jonny Brownlee as well!

No I'm suggesting that the Olympic dream is a fucking stupid one to be trying to sell to many people. It's just as daft as encouraging kids to follow their dreams of fame by pumping out shite like the X Factor or whatever. We should be encouraging and facilitating more active lifestyles not obsessing over medals.

Just awful, these private-schoolers with their access to tarmac, bicycles and water.

But that's nonsense, Jon. Cost is absolutely the problem. Yes, there are plenty of footy teams and classes and gym classes and all the rest, but it does all cost money if the school isn’t providing it for free. The local leisure centre won’t spend the 10-15 hours a week giving your kid gymnastics or fencing or tennis classes that they’d need to even get near being “Olympic level” out of the goodness of their hearts. It all costs money.

I know being facetious is amusing and all that, but it misses the point rather. Whist I could pay £3 to swim for a couple of hours at the local leisure centre, I'm certainly not going to get any better than just spuddling around without paying someone a lot more than that to teach/coach me.

I don't even know what to say. Half of sport is about potential glory. That's what spurs people on. Inspirational people doing incredible things. They're what gets you started in the first place and they give you something to aim for.

I suppose you never looked up to Eric Koston or Rodney Mullen, right?

Of course! I totally agree. But my point is that the cost of these things isn't as prohibitively expensive as is being made out here.

I was a keen swimmer as a kid, and I was coached. That wasn't particularly expensive. Few quid a session. My parents were far from wealthy at that stage. Very far from it. I gave it up in the end but a girl from my school who was coached by the same person wound up competing nationally. She was also "working class".

As I tried to articulate above (perhaps not so brilliantly), I think the private school kids have an advantage in convenience and opportunity to actually try these sports, but I firmly believe that even the poorest of families could find a way to support their child's dream of becoming a sportsperson in 90% of sports.

For a family on the average income it really is, though.

There are schemes that make this not the case though. For example, the All England Club have at any one time 4-500 kids from state schools who they've identified as having some talent, and those kids are given completely free tennis tuition until the age of 16.

More funding into schemes like this is one example of what should be done with the uptick in interest in sport that the Olympics provides.

When did windsurfing get into the olympics!

Solution! Large Hamster wheels in all family homes linked to generators. Medals all round and cheap, renewable energy forever!

Well I dunno how my parents managed it. Or that girl's.

Gun-running.

Which is what I said ages ago on this here very thread. There isn't anywhere near enough of this sort of thing, and should be lots more. And lots more sport in school.

Abso-bloody-exactly. Money is there for talented individuals, regardless of background. The problem is and was discovering this talent and getting people down to actually try their hand at a sport. The Olympics is perfect for encouraging this.

Obviously your parents didn't care more about their Sky subscription than their kid's illustrious footy career. That's the subtext with your "effort" comment, isn't it?

Once you start getting beyond "pretty good" to "really good" it must really start adding up. The kit for even the cheapest sport is going to cost you hundreds of quid to get the sort of stuff you need at the top level, plus not everyone can afford to take a day out to drive Jimmy to Stoke-on-Trent for the Regional Championships. If you have coaching on Thursday nights, and only one car, and Dad works late on Thursdays, you're pretty stuffed.

Take kid to practice
Take kid from practice to school
Take kid from school to practice
Take kid home
Buy new equipment once every 4 months due to kid growing or needing better kit
Take kid to competition
Take kid home from competition
Take kid to physio
Take kid home from physio

All of that takes time for a parent. And, on the lower incomes, if you're not working you are not earning.

I guess so, yeah. You are right, I just don't think the situation is as bad as is being made out. The Olympics are a good thing!

Absolutely, but I still can't see how hosting the Olympics or not would change this. Parents would still have to do this regardless, wouldn't they?

I don't really care who wins what in things like this, I like the people can run/jump/vault that far/high/long. I think encouraging people to do stuff is good, but not to turn sports clubs into talent factories with the aim of getting kids to win. Get them to enhjoy it, and then they'll win as they are doing something they enjoy.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... drome.html

Sad story is sad, he didn't even get to see super saturday

Almost every athlete from an ordinary background seems to have a story about all the sacrifices their parents needed to make to get them there. Note I said "ordinary" not rich or poor. I have to assume that it's not even an option for many. How the fuck anyone can argue that a brief career in athletics is accessible to everyone is beyond me.

And this is even after all the money we have pumped into it so far. So much of the funding is currently targeted at medals and success in competition that the public health aspect takes a back seat. Obviously there is some crossover between those two goals but on the whole I think it's fucking bullshit and is a piss poor use of public money.

Well, possibly not, because that £7bn we spunked on Seb Coe's ego could have been spent on putting a decent multi-discipline sports programme in place in every single school (primary and senior) in the country, so parents didn't have to do this. I shoudln't have to pay for my son to play football (for fun!) at aged 6 for christ's sake.

I concur!

99.99% of people taking part in any level of sport are never going to win anything above local league level. However taking part in pretty much any sport from Ironman contests to bowls is going to be beneficial, and is something we want to encourage. For most people, school PE should be about getting pupils into a physical pastime they can continue afterwards, at any level of competence.

Hold on a second, the state of sports in this country can't be that bad, we are third in the olympic medal table after all!

You'll never get kids interested in sport by telling them it's good for their health, you do it by telling them they can become a superstar. Then, when they're in the habit of exercise and enjoy doing it, you gently break it to them that they aren't good enough and should instead concentrate on their studies, hoping that they've enjoyed the sport enough to carry on doing it for fun into adulthood.

The point that started the discussion was that a disproportionate amount of medals come from rich kids, not that we can't win medals.

Money breeds success. Such is life in all respects.

I understand that. But my point is that concentrating on medals and measuring success in medals is not going to get the results. We are targeting an awful lot of spending at identifying and training an elite few with more participation seen as a by product. It needs to be the other way round.

I'm just dubious that it's going to create nearly the wave of interest and participation that people are predicting.

I don't know how you can say that when we've only concentrated on getting a good medal tally in the last decade or so. Before that we just about turned up and tried our best. And as Craster says, the top achievers in sport inspire the youngsters to play for fun. I don't think anyone is in the game of deluding children into thinking everyone has a chance at top level success.

OK, but given that we don't want a small, rich, healthy overclass and a large, fat, poor underclass, we need to fix that problem.

The vast majority of people who participate in sport are not in it for the competition, but for the exercise, community and experience. Many thousands of people (including Craster!) go running, but practically none of them are going to see the inside of Team GB vest. You might as well pump a bit of money into the elites to raise the profile of sports, but there's only ever going to a be dozen or so medals in running every few years.

Edit: I have no point

Maybe I come from a sporty family or something but this doesn't seem outrageous to me at all. If you want your kids to play a sport, you're going to have to spend a bit of money, and you're probably going to have to sacrifice some of your own time to nurture a talent or just give your kids a healthy lifestyle. That'll never change.

The rifles used in the 10m air rifle events are crazy expensive.

I paid £1,250 for mine back in 2005 and can probably sell it for more than that even today, the change in the health of the Euro has driven prices up in Germany where most of them come from.

And that's just the rifles, it doesn't include the extra special fore/rear sights that most of the Olympic shooters will be using (£250 a piece for a conservative estimate there) or the shooting jacket (£300-£400 for a good one), trousers (£150-£200) and boots (£100-£200)

You do have a point, it's just a very difficult one to argue, as I'm discovering!

My theory : Elite athletes are SO good, they discourage people from taking part. You've seen Bradley Wiggins do a time trial, try to emulate him, get knackered after 3 miles and quit, because he may as well be some sort of alien super-human cyborg compared to you and using him as a role model is like trying to copy Superman.

I think you get an uplift after any great exposure (apparently interest in tennis spikes annually after the competition in SW19), and then it settles down again. Retention is possibly the hardest thing for any club. As a random example, looking at Otley cycling club, the jump up from "leisure rides":



to "B Section" is quite high:



And that could put epople off, if they were to go out and suddenly what they have enjoyed doing isn't fun anymore.

ANECDOTE ALERT

My twitter feed this week is full of people who are talking about doing swimming, running and cycling, having picked it back up in the past couple of weeks. One girl who was frequently running 10k's 3 years ago then stopped has started training again and entered events in the past few weeks.

At the Blackheath Lounge-and-Booze-and-Watch-TVathon, there are (among the slobbing adults) seemingly 100's of kids between the ages of 5 and 12 running, cycling, playing football and any number of other sporting events. True, there are often a few kids kicking a ball around and chasing each other, but it got to the point on Sunday that they were getting in the way of me getting pissed while watching television.

If Beijing is any guide, the Olympics won't end in coverage terms on Sunday. There will be wall to wall stories, recaps and other such recollections of the games right through to the end of the year, on adult TV, kids TV and other media. The hope is that the kids who were enjoing running around so much at the weekend will still be encouraged to do the same next year. Just not in front of me when I'm watching TV.

ANECDOTE ENDS

I saw a bit of the air pistol shooting and thought they had all turned up wearing shell suits. What does a shooting jacket do?