The Leisure Review: La Flamme Rouge

La Flamme Rouge edition 13; dateline 2 May 2016

Down to Rio
Not long until Rio and it’s the question that we’re all asking: could this be the Games that will finally allow the International Olympic Committee to lay to rest the suspicions that it is a vast supranational money-laundering operation with a business model based on that of a New Jersey garbage business? Sadly, it looks unlikely. With less than 100 days to go, the situation looks pretty grim, with the latest Brazilian government minister responsible for standing in front of a camera and looking positive forced into ever more hopeful reassurances. Sewage in the harbour, facilities unfinished, a determinedly uninterested local population asking irritating questions like, how can we afford this when you keep telling us we need to cut public services? It looks more likely that this will be the point at which the IOC admits that the system is broken and it is running out of places that can be shaken down in exchange for some highly sponsored Olympic-ring knickknacks. What if the IOC became a sports development unit, raising money from the sale of TV rights and sponsorship, and spending it on building facilities and infrastructure that would leave a legacy of sports facilities and systems? Of course the question of how would anyone get rich would be the stumbling block, along with the inability to understand the concept of money going into the host nation and into sport rather than out of the host nation and into the bank accounts of IOC personnel. Get back to us in 2020 and we’ll explain it again.

The Orbit: now with a slide!
The official La Flamme Rouge view of the London 2012 legacy is, to paraphrase Ghandi, that it would have been a good idea. However, seeing as we lost interest as soon as they cancelled the Friend Ship idea, we’re not best placed to comment. As you may remember, the Friend Ship involved a sailing vessel, to be crewed by young people of all nations, travelling around the world spreading the message of peace, understanding and co-operation. At that time these principles were still fondly imagined to be the foundations of the Olympic ideal, so it was probably just as well it got binned about two months after they had announced it. Our only subsequent muttering has involved reference to football’s occupation of the London Olympic stadium as the final nail in the legacy coffin but, not for the first time, it seems we were wrong. That coffin has been prised open and the Boris Lickspittle Orbit Sculpture, as it may or may not be officially called, has been used as the wooden stake driven through the cold, decapitated corpse that was the legacy ideal [see the Leisure Manager’s Library for full details of vampire extinction]. Given that the sculpture-stroke-viewing-tower cost £19 million to build, is losing 10 grand a week and is attracting not far off half the numbers of people anticipated, drastic measures were needed. It has been decided that the best thing to do is to spend another £3.5 million on putting a slide in that will raise the price of the full visitor experience from £12 to £17. We fully expect the crowds to flock in and rescue the project, just as we expect the involvement of Premier League football with the Olympic stadium to deliver everything that the London 2012 legacy wallahs hoped for. Wake us up when it’s all over and we’ll explain it again.

Jess Varnish v British Cycling
And with the uncanny sense of timing that has seen so many medals turned from silver into gold, British Cycling chose the ‘100 days to go’ as the banner under which to launch their complete implosion. No sooner had we typed the headline ‘Jess Varnish v British Cycling’ than the story had morphed into ‘Jess Varnish and others v British Cycling’; then ‘Jess Varnish and others v Shane Sutton’; then ‘Shane Sutton leaves British Cycling’. The story continued to develop faster than e-coli in a petri dish and at the time of going to what our colleagues at the Leisure Review still laughably refer to as ‘press’ the headlines involved something about second-hand bike parts and Chris Hoy’s shorts being knocked out from a bike shop in Stockport. They just had time to squeeze in a positive doping test for a British rider before the UK Sport referee stepped in to put an end to an unequal contest between British Cycling’s reputation and the wrecking ball of incessant revelation. An independent inquiry has been promised and the wisdom of putting an Australian in a position in which subtlety, nuance and sensitivity might be required will be reviewed. Meanwhile, the revelations will no doubt continue to come and the questions continue to be asked. Our favourite at the moment: who does Victoria Pendleton get to do her decorating now? As soon as we know, so will you.

Invisible sports
The trend for once-popular sports disappearing behind the paywall of subscription TV is growing but sometimes we can’t help thinking it’s for the best. Of course, cricket is missed by a sizeable proportion of the great many people who haven’t followed it to Sky and football is heading back to the days when the only game everyone watched on the telly was the FA Cup final but there’s just about enough football on Match of the Day for most casual football followers and both cricket and footy are well served by television news and the newspapers. Motor racing, once one of the mainstays of British sport, will soon to be put out of its misery with Formula One going off our terrestrial screens, to be missed by virtually no one apart from those people misguided enough to go into business with Bernie Ecclestone. It’s a similar story with boxing, which once had a proud tradition and its leading lights a place in our cultural history. Now, with the blizzard of title versions and the tirelessly tiresome theatricals that seem to go with every bout, the product has become too tarnished to be recognised as the sweet science many once claimed it to be. Never mind. We’ll have our memories of shared sporting experiences and the thrilling prospect of sports administrators’ biographies in which they explain in excruciating detail why the demise and disappearance of the sport they made a fortune out of wasn’t their fault.

Public health: a long-term success
Figures from the Office for National Statistics show that the number of teenage pregnancies among under-18s in England has halved since 1998. The reduction is widely attributed to the teenage pregnancy strategy which began in 1999 and was established as a long-term initiative to address a complex public health and inequalities issue. Alison Hadley, director of the Teenage Pregnancy Knowledge Exchange at the University of Bedfordshire, led the strategy and welcomed this as “an extraordinary achievement”. She commented: “This shows that committed senior leadership, dedicated local practitioners, effective education programmes and easier access to contraception equips young people to make informed choices and brings down rates even in deprived areas.” This area of public health is not among those most frequently visited by the Leisure Review but it does demonstrate that public policy initiatives can and do work given the will and commitment of those able to provide the expertise and the funding, all over the long term and free from the day-to-day petty politicking that mars so many areas of public life.

Wisdom under a hedge
Readers of the Leisure Review – those that pore over the news pages therein at least – will be all too aware of the controversy surrounding the movement of the transfer of part of the photographic collection of the National Media Museum (in Bradford) to the Victoria and Albert Museum (in London). It’s a grim business and no mistake, but fuelling the scandal’s pyres we find an unlikely hero. Step forward, Mr Eric Pickles, former Tory cabinet minister, who has described the scene as one of “a southern elite” deciding Bradford is “just too far away”. This may be the first time that we, or indeed anyone else, may have had cause to write the following sentence since the FA Cup was found under a hedge but here it goes: Pickles may be right.

A hard stare at public art
Public art is one of the most contentious areas of aesthetics and the evidence for the prosecution (or perhaps the defence, depending on who the instructing aesthetic solicitor might be) continues to pile up in the vicinity of Tintagel, Cornwall. Not only has the bearded face of Merlin has been carved into the rock of this land of legends but also a large statue of an ancient warrior, who might or might not be a representation of King Arthur, has appeared to facilitate visitors’ photography. Much unrest has been caused by English Heritage’s enthusiasm for these installations, most notably among local historians who have challenged the “theme park” approach to promoting the area. Our only advice is to see for yourself but make sure you visit St Pancras station first. The train to the West Country doesn’t leave from there but you can see the statue of the kissing couple that looms over the platforms and realise that nothing can possibly be as bad as that.

Understated joy
A visit to St Pancras does, however, afford a view of the Martin Jennings statue of Sir John Betjeman, which shows how things should be done when it comes to getting arty in a public place. It’s an understated joy that captures the spirit of the man and the location, along with the thrill and wonder of travel.

Campaigning for parks, again
The controversy over the decision by Stoke Gifford parish council to levy a charge for everyone taking part in the regular ‘parkrun’ events provoked a great deal of reaction among those who felt this represented a step too far in the ‘user pays’ culture of public services. Given our rather lax attitude to physical fitness, La Flamme Rouge is not best placed to comment on the complexities of the debate but it has at least served to highlight the value, importance and popularity of our public parks, one of the last bastions of equitable access to leisure facilities. Get the banners out: we’ll need another campaign any minute.

Shocking? Not much
As inveterate fans of professional cycling, La Flamme Rouge is inured to the shock of finding a sports performer failing a drugs test. News that Maria Sharapova was found to be taking what most of us would regard as bizarre approach to cardiac health registered a slight spike on the trace line of our interest; that everyone in tennis/Russia/sport seems to have been at it, not at all. Of slightly more interest was that a footballer, this time Mamadou Sakho of Liverpool FC, had managed to fail a drugs test but only because we will have had to read deep into the story to find how some governing body or other will have explained/dismissed/mitigated the offence to minimise the fall-out for the player/the franchise/the Beautiful Game. Surely the news that almost everyone who takes part in an endurance sport, such as, just off the top of our heads, cycling or swimming, is suffering from asthma is surely proof of the innate goodness of the whole world of sport and the good that it does for everyone involved in/associated with/profiting from the whole highly sponsored and extravagantly funded hoo-ha? Of course it is.

Shocking? Clear!
Slightly more shocking than the news of Mr Sakho’s positive test was reading the report from an experienced sports journalist in a reputable Sunday newspaper on proper, actual paper and everything suggesting that drug use in football was not likely to be much of problem on the grounds that professional football was a sport requiring neither endurance nor strength. It would be easy to get that impression from the teams we’re used to watching but not if you spend your time watching any of the teams who actually pay their players, most of whom seem to be quite big and quite fit. Darts it ain’t.

The Leisure Hall of Fame
Hall of fame for leisure: where to start? With the editor throwing the full weight of the laughably lightweight Leisure Review behind Mr Leybourne’s suggestion that the sport, leisure and culture sector should have its own hall of fame [see TLR passim] here at La Flamme Rouge we’ve been secretly monitoring his post bag and the desk jotter with the word ‘ideas’ written at the top of the page on a daily basis. To date the page remains steadfastly blank but our own straw pool suggests that the front runners in the race to be the first to have their chosen names and various body parts pressed into a panel of wet cement include Ralph Riley and Alan Smith, leisure legends both, who each did so much together and apart to make the sector’s professional status what it is today. Remember, the clock’s ticking and that mortar will have to be used before it goes off so you’d better vote soon.

Mrs Smith