The campaign for whippet racing, bog snorkelling and cheese rolling to be added to the Olympic roster starts here.
And while we’re at it, we’ll be putting in a good word for Morris dancing, the Eton Wall Game and extreme haggis hurling.
Our offensive will focus on post codes way beyond the Greater London area. For the far flung reaches of the British Isles, we will use communications techniques practiced in those parts. We will deploy carrier pigeons to win those narrow minds.
Our objective is to shake the country out of it’s apathy towards London 2012.
And why?, I hear you ask.
Well, Monday, 27th July, 2009 signalled three years to the Games of the XXX Olympiad in London, England. The milestone and, the media rumpus surrounding it, would be met with widespread enthusiasm from the public at large you would have thought.
Well, not exactly, judging by the wave of indifference deluging the phone lines of the BBC Radio Five breakfast show the same day.
The propagators of doom, callers from Birmingham, Leeds, Manchester, Edinburgh and Glasgow, vented anti-London sentiment and questioned why their taxes would be put to bringing the Games to these shores.
They were appalled that their hard-earned cash would be used to line the pockets of southern softies – and accommodate Johnny Foreigner in his quest for sporting excellence. Welcome to Britain’s north-south divide.
“I live in the north of England and I’m a taxpayer so I’m indirectly contributing to the 2012 Olympics, but how will they benefit me?” one caller asked. “They should give us all free tickets,” he added.
And then there was the old chestnut. “Taxpayers’ money spent on the 2012 Olympics would be better spent on the NHS (National Health Service).” No it wouldn’t. But getting gang members off the streets of Moss Side and onto their local sports grounds might just ease the logjam at accident and emergency departments.
In Greater Manchester, our campaign will adopt the slogan – “Take a shot at sport instead” – and will be music to the ears of the numerous victims of gun crime in those environs.
Another caller from the shires, an alleged sports fan (rugby league to be precise), took a cheap swipe at synchronized swimmers, while questioning the investment his country was lavishing on the “London Games”. Additional callers from his neighbourhood agreed.
It was classic Monty Python at times … “Apart from better sanitation and medicine and education and irrigation and public health and roads and a freshwater system and baths and public order … what have the Romans done for us?”
For Romans, read Londoners.
Online chat forums are also clogged with northerners bickering like a bunch of fish wives.
Mr Grim Up t’North’s premise, based as it is on economic benefit, is flawed, particularly at this construction stage.
Current Olympic Delivery Authority (ODA) statistics, freely available on the official web site, confirm that pockets will be lined well beyond the M25 motorway, Greater London’s perimeter fence.
And, we are still three years out. Businesses across the country have been invited to tender for a raft of infrastructure-related contracts.
There is £6 billion of supply chain contracts to be awarded by organisers of the 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games and its top tier suppliers. The events will generate 75,000 business opportunities.
Contracts worth over £1 billion have so far been let, most to small and medium-sized companies. Fifty per cent of those companies are based outside London.
The commercial rewards on offer were outlined at the national launch of the London 2012 Business Network held at Manchester United’s Old Trafford stadium – one of the venues for the Olympic football tournament.
Over 800 north-west firms have registered interest in the procurement opportunities and at least 20 companies based in the region have already won contracts to supply goods and services to the ODA and other 2012 contractors.
Opportunities exist in construction, professional services, tourism, hospitality, sport, food and creative sectors.
The list of confirmed building contractors to date includes companies headquartered in Derby, Walsall, Wolverhampton and Belfast.
One such contractor in the midlands has struck a £3m deal to barrier the Olympic Village. Watson Steel, of Bolton, will supply steel for the main Olympic stadium.
Furthermore, in the run up, sports facilities across the country will receive funding to upgrade and provide training camps for over 200 competing nations. As for venues, Weymouth will host sailing while stadia across the UK will stage the Games’ football tournament. Rowing and flat water canoeing will be held in Windsor.
“All the jobs will go to Londoners,” one called stated. Not quite. In terms of employment, 36 per cent of the present workforce is drawn from outside London.
As for legacy, the benefits will live on long after the dissenters have been silenced.
Wasn’t fending off opposition from Madrid, Moscow, New York and Paris enough to satisfy the xenophobes from the Republic of Yorkshire? Apparently not.
Our campaign message to them is: Put your regional prejudices to one side. Be proud to be part of the greatest sporting event known to mankind. And be proud to call the “London” Games your own.
To borrow from JFK … ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country.
A good place to start would be to accept that for two weeks from 27th July 2012, London will become the sporting capital of the world.
And accept also, that Grimsby, Pugsley, Whitby, Rotheram and Hutton Le Hole didn’t quite measure up in the opinion of the International Olympic Committee.
Funny Peculiar English 