UTILITY OF OLYMPIC GAMES: A TONGUE IN CHEEK VIEW

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.