Gripped By Olympic Fever?

Football Business found itself in the pub last Friday night and while talking to a mate about next years cricket season the conversation got round to the Olympics.

The Olympic Act (2006) passed by Parliament is a hefty document, weighing in at 61 pages and amongst the many things it does a law in there means there can be no other sport played in London at the time of the games and because of this England are only played South Africa for three Test Matches rather than the usual four of five.

Given that SA are the second best Test Match Team in the world the prospect of England taking them on has got cricket fans excited and my mate is a trifle vexed at the curtailing of the series.

He went a little further, claiming he was planning to “go away” during the Olympics because he wasn’t bothered by the whole thing and he was already getting annoyed by the hype.

Now, I don’t agree with that necessarily – in fact I have already gone on record on this blog to say that I am quite positive about it – but his comments did get me thinking. With the games now less than nine months away are we gripped by “Olympic Fever” like it is claimed, or are we, as a country, less than enthused at this stage?

Ticket sales went well, with many sports sold out, but this doesn’t tell the whole story, most tickets were bought by those in the south of the UK, with less and less uptake the further North you go. Which points to the whole thing being a rather Southern bias to things. It seems that despite the “UK being gripped by Olympics fever” that many swathes of it are rather underwhelmed by the whole thing.

In fairness there are some events in other areas of the country – the football primarily being taken all over (although there’s no 5 or 6 a side stuff no matter how much we lobby!!) but as we argued on here the other week Football Business thinks that Football has no business at the Olympics so that is rather hollow anyway.

Then there was the revelation last week that the Government is spending £750,000 on tickets. As The Telegraph put it: “2012 has been dubbed The Peoples Games, that must be because the people are paying for absolutely everything.” Again, in fairness, that represents just 0.1% of the total amount of tickets, but it just seems a little too much expense when the public are having to pay so much for everything else.

Then there is the anticipated traffic chaos – bizarrely the lady in charge of Transport for the games was on radio the other week and her plan to alleviate the problems appeared to be “Londoners can work from home for a fortnight.”

There are, in fairness a lot of good things about the Olympics. The stadiums are completed already, the organisation appears to be running well at this stage and there are hundreds, if not thousands, of competitors who are focussing on their training for perhaps the biggest event of their lives.

But next time someone tells you that “Britain is gripped by Olympic Fever” perhaps you should look beyond the headlines. A lot of people couldn’t care less.