London 2012

No baseball in London 2012

Friday, 8 July 2005, 18:25

so much for my vested interest in the 2012 London Olympics.

What a blow for British baseball:

This morning, the IOC Session reviewed the Olympic Programme. A vote was carried out sport by sport according to the order that the sports appear in rule 46 of the Olympic Charter, with members voting to decide which sport should be included in the Olympic Programme for 2012. IOC members chose to include 26 sports on the programme for London 2012, with Baseball and Softball not being selected for 2012.

Update: The reaction from the sports’ managing agency in Britain, BaseballSoftballUK.

Update 2: The Australian reports that the decision to axe sports associated with America may have been a protest by Arab countries against the Iraq war. I’m not sure I buy that.

A more likely explaination is that the IOC was reacting against the uncooperative owners of the clubs in Major League Baseball, who have refused to let top professionals compete in the Olympics and have until recently failed to take action against the rampant doping that has plagued the sport in America for years.

The Evening Standard’s report speaks volumes about baseball and softball’s status in Britain. The lede is more concerned with the decision not to replace the two dropped sports with rugby union.

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London 2012: Is anybody actually in favour?

Wednesday, 6 July 2005, 17:02

Pass your ID card: Is another UK blogosphere consensus is in the making? Diamond Geezer) and Shot By Both Sides appear to be lonely voices in favour of hosting the Olympics in London.

The Sharpener’s Paris correspondent, Katie Bartleby, notices that while the official French bid folks are already serving up the sour grapes, ordinary Parisians understand that they have won today:

I knew the announcement had been made because several of the apartments in my courtyard had applause burst out of the open windows. That’s French people, clapping that London got the games. This is not a country known for being magnanimous losers (or even magnanimous winners.) They’re pleased London won because they want to inflict the games on London. That’s not magnanimity, that’s Schadenfreude.

Nosemonkey’s post from last November about the economic arguments against the London Olympics are worth revisiting:

… The cost estimate is just £2.375bn — only a third of the Athens games. Will we stick to this budget? Well, if the Millennium Dome disaster is anything to go by, no - that hideous white elephant is currently costing the country nearly £30 million a year just for it to stay closed and empty, blighting the landscape and the view from Greenwich Park.

Of this under-estimate of £2.375 billion, £875 million is to be borne by London through a £20 pa increase in council tax. So I’m going to have to fork out an extra £160 over the next eight years when my Council Tax is already extortionate to pay for something I don’t want in a part of London I’ve never been? Great. And those who actually WANT the Olympics — are they going to get free tickets in return for having their hard-earned money taken from them to pay for a bunch of well-paid athletes to have a jolly? Bollocks are they.

I’m not sure about those “well-paid” athletes, since the underachieving millionaires of the American basketball team are hardly representative, but the rest of that seems fair. Further afield, non-Londoners ought to be enen more incensed at the thought of tax increases to stump up for a fortnight of bread and circuses. Quoth Chicken Yoghurt:

Unless the marathon runs past my front door here in Brighton, the Olympics coming to the UK will impact on my life not at all — apart from, of course, all the money that will swill away to pay for this smug back-slap. I’m sure if you live on a sink estate in Glasgow you must be jumping for joy right now. As you will be if you run any of the functionally redundant yet highly lucrative marketing consultancies or advertising agencies that swarm around London like mussels around a sewage outlet.

Not to mention the small local businesses in the Lea Valley are not all that happy about being forced to relocate.

I instinctively agree with all this. But as someone involved with the grassroots organisation of a minority sport, I have a vested interest. I love the idea that some of my younger teammates will get the opportunity to compete at the highest amateur level — if the IOC don’t decide to drop baseball from the 2012 programme tomorrow. I’m also excited about the possibility of long-overdue investment in world-class training facilities for the sport in a city where decent baseball diamonds are hard to come by nonexistant.

Nice as they are for the handful of top athletes in each sport, though, world-class venues is not what most grassroots sports need in Britain. As Camilla Cavendish put it in the Times today, many of the anti-Olympics financial arguements still apply now that the bid has been successful:

… if we really want to get a new generation involved in sport, if we want to create a base to nurture the athletes of the future, we need to spend money on inner city sports facilities, not elite performance venues. Some local sports projects have already been cut because Government has raided the sports budget to fund the Olympic bid. The budget for south-central London has fallen from £27 million over a three-year period to £16 million over four years. That’s money that would have gone to local basketball courts, tennis courts, playing fields. Sport England’s community budget is £2 million a year for the next five years for the whole of London: what is that going to buy?

Given that, cuo bono? Journalist Andrew Jennings, who has written three books critical of the IOC thinks he knows:

“One of the frequently uniting factors of all these bids, for all these cities is a small group of people who wish to get richer than they already are or have jobs for even longer,” Jennings said yesterday by telephone from England.

“Whichever city wins tomorrow — there’s seven years’ work for that lot. The unifying factor is self interest by property speculators.”

That’s will certainly be seven years of news stories and blog entries to keep an eye on “that lot”.

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Weekend blog catchup

Sunday, 17 April 2005, 23:25

Jeff Jarvis of Buzzmachine says “there’s something very wrong with your life when you start looking on Saturday as blog catch-up day.”

Sunday isn’t much better, I guess. But following a manic couple of days, here are some quick links to things I have somehow managed to find the time to find interesting over the last two days:

• Presenting a list of WMDs that terrorists might want to obtain, the head of the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), Germany’s international intelligency agency, says he doesn’t think al-Qaeda has managed to obtain nuclear weapons, but that he his concerned about radiological weapons.
• The Periscope notes a provocative New Statesman article that says organisations in both Saudi Arabia and the United States are exporting fundamentalism.
• Tony Blair should be more careful about where he sticks his fingers — especially when photographers are present.
• Matthew Yglesias has discovered that he would be a Labour supporter in the British election, largely because of Iraq. British readers will find the comments section on this post interesting as an example of how the American centre-left is discussing the British election.
• Speaking of American perceptions of the election, be sure to check out the Christian Science Monitor’s take on MG Rover and the election.
• Looking at the looming referendum in France, the Monitor also has a pro-adoption editorial on the European Constitution:
  

  … one overarching appeal should be made: The EU and its precursors have successfully overcome the aggressive nationalism that caused so much suffering in the past century. Overall, the EU has proven such a success that other countries are clamoring to join. The constitution — no, let’s say the “simplifying treaty” — is the next logical step in this historic experiment.

• Timothy Garton Ash and Timothy Snyder have a lengthy piece about Ukraine’s Orange Revolution in the New York Review of Books.
• Dan Gillmor has an important post linking to various thoughts on the changing economics of journalism.
• Via Gillmor, I also came across a topical article by Chris Daly, a journalism professor at Boston University, entitled “Are Bloggers Journalists? Let’s ask Thomas Jefferson”.
• Major sporting events are bad for the environment, reports the New Scientist. Researchers have found that the 2004 FA Cup final at Cardiff’s Millennium Stadium had an ecological footprint of 3,051 hectares.
• And oh yes: John Foster is the first baseball player to have played in both Britain’s top domestic baseball competition and Major Leagues. While he was a college player in 1997, he spent a summer with my club, the Brighton Buccaneers, before going back to the States and becoming a professional. Following a serious injury last year, he’s just been promoted back to the Major Leagues by the Atlanta Braves.

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