Olympics - are the medals value for money?

PeanutsMolloy

Ok we're all revved up by Brits crushing the oppo (especially the Aussies of course) and winning a stack of medals but what is the reasonable price for our collective feelgood factor? What is the practical benefit to the country?
£235m of lottery and other "public funds" have been spent on 313 UK contestants at the Beijing Olympics and we've won 16 golds (36 medals) to date.
You could say that's just £4 per head of population and cheap at the price.
Or you could say that's £750,000 per contestant and (to date) £15m per gold and seems a bit excessive.
Given that many of the medal-winning athletes (and even some that don't win medals) can now do quite well financially for themselves (some courtesy of the Beeb), other than a national feelgood factor (no doubt the Govt thinks that we're such saps that this may translate to the opinion polls) is there any justification for a use of funds when any one of us could name a dozen other important (even life-saving) causes?

Friend Or Defoe

If we don't spend much on sport people complain like in Atlanta 96. When we do well people complain that we've spent too much. :-(

It's been money well spent in my opinion.

AllLeftFoot

Good value for money, especially if it can encourage kids to get interested in sport - whether it be cycling, swimming, BMX racing or whatever. There must be some social and long-term health benefits in that.

Friend Or Defoe

Well put AllLeftFoot.

charltonkeston

You can always find something else to spend money on, NHS, police, education to name 3. But I think all 3 of them would see an indirect benefit in investing in sport.

Ledge

Investing in sport is a way to keep kids off the street , benefitting the police, make them fitter - benefiting the NHS - so money well spent.

And the amounts given from lottery are small change.

Look at how much the yanks must invest and their medal haul compared to ours in comparson to size of country so think it is all money well spent.

Rothko

As ledge said, the US spend billions through there college system in Sport, and there not running away with the medal table.

My big concern is, that we're doign what all host countries tend to do in the Olympics before the one they host, which is shoot up the medal table, and then slightly overperform that when we host.

What the worry is, is that the investment drops off post London 2012, and by 2020 we're below Beijing levels. It needs Government investment to stay in place.

Salad

That's true Ledge - for many sports for sure.

But does investing in sailing and rowing etc. keep many kids off the street?

Perhaps the money spent on some sports could be more beneifically spent on athletics, ball sports etc.

That would result in less gold medals of course because athletics is more competitive than the sports where you need a lot of money just to take part (sailing, velodrome etc.).

EGAddick

''What the worry is, is that the investment drops off post London 2012, and by 2020 we're below Beijing levels. It needs Government investment to stay in place. ''


That's exactly what the Australian Team is complaining about now.



The Olympics is a wonderful opportunity for the sports infrastructure in London to be vastly improved that hopefully will leave a legacy for future generations. Weren't the swimmers complaining a few years ago that they didn't have an Olympic size pool to train in? Take sports like Judo for instance, a huge venue is going to be built at Dartford and if Team GB is a success it will lead to more kids taking up an interest in a specific sport.

PeanutsMolloy

Hmmm. I get the gist but I’m not entirely convinced that bankrolling to the tune of £1/4 billion a few elite sportsmen to Olympic glory every 4 years is likely cause a material number of burger-chompin’, alco-pop swillin’, teen-impregnatin’, knife-wieldin’ oiks to turn into model citizens. Call me old-fashioned but I thought that was what state education and basic parenting was for (though I freely admit that both are seriously deficient in the UK at present).

The fact is that, while GB is Europe’s No. 1 in the Olympic medals table, we are (for example) precisely bottom of the European league of survival rates for kidney cancer; and “NICE” (aka the NHS/Govt) has refused to fund (explicitly because it cannot afford to) the £24k pa needed for a drug that is proven to prolong significantly the lives of sufferers of that cancer.

I am not saying that we should not “invest” in prospective Olympic success (in the hope, no matter how forlorn, that it may indeed have some of the beneficial effects mentioned) but it is a matter of proportion and of weighing up deliverable results. As has been said, the whole effort would be wasted if the level of investment is not maintained and we all know that it will not – so bad are the public finances that, apparently, cut backs are planned already even for 2012. Ipso facto…..money down the drain.

JohnnyH2

I think what these games have shown is when real investment goes into a few sports, e.g. cycling and rowing it gives us abetter chance than spreading the money more evenly. Concentrate on a few rather than a lot for 2012.