The London Olympics: 100 Days to Go.

Today (18/4/12) marks 100 days until the start of the 2012 Olympic Games that are being held in London, UK. So it seems like an opportune moment to talk about the history of the modern Olympics which might surprise you because it's got very little to do with sporting excellence and even less to do with the ancient Greeks. Although the Greeks did hold some sort of sporting event near Mount Olympus it was a very different affair that bore little resemblance to the Olympic Games as we understand it. Then about 2000 years ago the Greeks decided it was far too silly stopped bothering.

The modern Olympics actually have their roots in the Shropshire town of Much Wenlock in Victorian England. Here a Doctor W.P Brookes noticed that the working classes were spending a lot of their free time in pubs and gambling dens. He decided that these sinful activity's were having a negative effect on the productivity of the working classes. So in 1841 he set up the "Much Wenlock Society for the Promulgation of Physical Culture" in order to save the poor from themselves by getting them involved in rigorous physical activity. In 1850 Much Wenlock hosted the inaugural "Brookes Olympian Games" with events such as running, jumping, blind wheelbarrow racing and pig racing. In 1866 Brookes tried turning his games into a national event by staging the first Modern Olympics at the Great Exhibition in Crystal Palace in London. This was a complete flop but it did bring the idea to the attention of a Baron Coubertin who used his power and influence to stage the first international Modern Olympics in Athens in 1896.

Baron Coubertin's Olympics co-incided with the birth of the industrial age and the start of globalisation as nations started to trade with each other on an unprecedented scale. However travel between nations was very time consuming and often hazardous. So the Olympics provided the perfect excuse for national governments and captains of industry to get together in the same place every four years. By rights the Olympics fad should have died out in the 1920's with the introduction of the first commercial aeroplanes. However the challenge of which nation/race produces the fastest and the strongest appealed proponents of the thoroughly discredited "science" of eugenics which was very popular at the time especially amongst people like Adolf Hitler who hosted the 1936 Games in Berlin.

The start of the Jet Age in the 1950's should have meant that the Olympics never re-emerged from their enforced break during the Second World War but the start of the Jet Age co-incided with the start of the Cold War. This saw the first and second worlds being almost totally cut off from each other by the Iron Curtain. So once again the Olympics found itself providing the perfect forum for east and west to meet up every four years in a highly tense and politically charged environment. Although the Cold War ended some twenty years ago the Olympics have continued as a way for nations and increasingly multi-national corporations to come together to compete with and intimidate each other. In fact you could say that the Olympic event that is most widely participated in is espionage.

As a result while there are many good reasons to protest against the Olympics I wouldn't attempt it because the risk of unintended consequences is far too high. For example campaigners against BP's sponsorship could well find themselves in the situation where their protest is the thing that caused the traffic congestion that caused the man to miss the meeting that would have prevented BP getting another large contract. That's not my idea of effective protest.