The Olympic season has come and gone. Team GB got loads of
medals, we all felt elated and good for a short while. The country is a bit
quieter now. London has retuned back to normalcy.
The politicians and the sports personalities justified the
humongous cost of about 11 billion pounds by declaring that the country would
get great health and economic benefits from it. Did it? Apart from providing a
great entertainment at a massive cost, I do not think Olympics did or will do
any good for the populace at large. Yes, some benefitted, namely, the athletes,
their coaches, their managers, some sponsoring businesses and of course a few
politicians. Improvement of physical and
economical health of the whole country?
Certainly not.
Olympic type games do not provide much benefit to health.
The professional Olympic athletes are not a good role model for that. Throwing of heavy balls or lifting
heavyweight 10 to 12 hrs a day is really not good for the body. The human
joints and muscles are not meant for constant running, jumping and bending your
body for all your waking hours. This is obvious by the high incidence of joint
and muscle injuries to these professional athletes.
Sports and games for an
hour or two as a form of physical exercise are certainly good for the
health. The money should have been
better spent on large number of small projects in schools and communities to
achieve that rather than on Olympics.
There was a time hundreds of years ago when running faster
than anyone else or throwing things farther than anyone else was useful to
society (mainly for war or hunting). If one could lift very heavy objects, he
would be in demand to bring big rocks for building works or for transporting
kings & queens on palanquins, but now machines are much better for these
jobs. Similarly, an excellent javelin thrower would have been a great asset in
a war or a hunt. But in this day and age
what use is there for the best runner or swimmer apart from providing
entertainment. Even as an entertainment
it is not good enough to economically support itself without taxpayer's help.
The skills which are honoured in Olympic games are of no use
to the modern society. It is a hangover from the ancient days and glamorized by
the vested interest groups. Why not instead, glorify and honour the skills, which really
matter to the society now? Why not celebrate the best teacher, the best
engineer, the best social worker, the best doctor, the best nurse, the best
author etc? Yes, we do bestow a few
prizes such as Nobel, Pulitzer etc. But they are celebrated at nowhere near the
same scale as Olympics.
To improve the general health of the populace and make
better future citizens there must be better ways to spend 11 billion pounds
than on these obsolete archaic pursuits.
