David Cameron hopes that the Paralympics will change our attitudes to disability. In the interview he gave to Channel 4’s Alex Brooker just before the opening ceremony (which I cannot for the life of me find a clip of), the Prime Minister said that he wanted us all to focus on what was possible rather than what was impossible with regards to disability. A laudable aim? Not necessarily, when you consider his government’s record on disability.
The government’s policy of cutting benefits and trying to move more disabled people into work has been a miserable failure. Hundreds of people died last year after being declared “fit to work” by Paralympics sponsor ATOS, while over 50,000 people (over one third of all claimants delcared fit for work) have had their Work Capability Assessment overturned on appeal. Yet by framing the Paralympics in the narrative of “what is possible” David Cameron continues to steer us all down the line of believing that there are only two options for the disabled: be a Paralympic athlete or be a benefits scrounger.
Having spent the last two weeks watching disabled people break world records and achieve the seemingly impossible, we can perhaps be forgiven for falling for the “what is possible” narrative. We have, after all, acquired a whole host of new heroes: Ellie Simmonds, Alex Zanardi, Kylie Grimes, Sarah Storey, Johnny Peacock, Hannah Cockroft, David Weir, Terezinha Guilhermina have all become household names synonymous with courage and perseverance in the face of adversity. It is a hugely empowering story for the disabled and able-bodied alike. Arguably though, it is not the full story, and the question we should be asking is not “what is possible” but “how is it possible”.
Throughout the Paralympics, we have seen glimpses of where the narrative breaks down. We saw Mirjam de Koning-Peper not start at the S6 100m freestyle because her condition – which is variable – had deteriorated. We heard athletes thank a dozen people – coaches, physios, funders – who have supported them and enabled them to get to where they are. We saw Ade Adepitan demonstrate how he could actually turn his wheelchair in the bathrooms in the Paralympic village – the first Paralympic village with that particular feature! We saw, albeit briefly and only on Channel 4’s brilliant The Last Leg, armless athletes struggle to get out of an Olympic swimming pool with no ramps. No matter how much courage and perseverance you have, individual achievement does not happen in isolation.
Unfortunately, we still live in a society where the odds are overwhelmingly stacked against disabled people. With the government’s sustained two-year campaign of painting anyone on any kind of benefits as a scrounger, we have seen disability hate crime soar. People are having their benefits taken away, being declared fit to work in an economy with an unemployment rate of 8% and with no support to help them make a successful transition into work. They are being put through extremely stressful assessments which often exacerbate their conditions. By all means, our attitudes to disability should change – but the first people to change their attitude should be David Cameron and his cabinet.
Yet we have also seen how the right support and the right investment can enable anyone to achieve their full potential. Lottery funding and the rare corporate sponsorship have enabled athletes like Hannah Cockroft to shine. Channel 4 has invested £600,000 in training and developing their amazing team of disabled presenters. In these rare and exceptional cases where we have bothered to create an even playing field, we have managed to all but obliterate the boundaries between the disabled and the (temporarily) able-bodied. Yet that takes time, it takes investment and dedication from all of us as a society. Can we all commit to doing that? Can you, Mr Cameron?

I had tickets for the men’s 5000m Olympic final in which Mo Farah won his second gold medal. I chose to go to the Edinburgh Fringe instead – and didn’t regret it for a minute!
Like much of the rest of middle(class) England, I got reasonably excited in the run-up to the Olympics – sufficiently so that I applied for three sets of tickets in the initial ballot. I never thought I had a chance to actually get the athletics tickets – they were my wildcard application. I was much more hopeful about the rhythmic gymnastics (little did I know it would be six times oversubscribed) or the BMX (alas, no). Track and field it was in the end, and I was happy with that.
As the Olympics approached, however, I started having misgivings about what was being done to London and to civil liberties throughout the country in the name of Seb Coe and our Olympic overlords. It started with heavy-handed enforcement of sponsors’ brands, murmurs about sponsors’ top executives being given places in the torch relay ahead of people who had genuinely contributed to their community, and even more visible and intrusive “total policing” on my regular trips to London. The tipping point for me though were the Olympic missiles. That was when it became clear that LOCOG and the government were not looking for genuine security so much as enacting yet another piece of security theatre to be able to point at in the event of something actually going wrong. It made me feel both less safe and that I no longer wanted to be part of this.
The Edinburgh Fringe – and more specifically writer Neil Gaiman and musician Amanda Palmer – came to my rescue. They announced a one-night-only show on Sunday August 12th. There was no way I was going to be in London on the 11th and in Edinburgh on the 12th without teleportation, a time machine, or the mother of all headaches. After a quick phonecall to my partner’s parents to see if one of them wanted to pick up my spare ticket, my choice was made.
My attitude to the Olympics changed somewhat with Danny Boyle’s opening ceremony, and I spent much of the following 17 days glued to the television watching the most obscure sports which normally don’t get coverage, and watching women’s sports in particular. My enjoyment of the events did little to ease my misgivings about either the security or the civil liberties issues that accompanied the Games, and so I had no regrets when I put my partner on a train south on Friday or even when I watched from behind a sofa cushion as Mo Farah won his second gold medal on Saturday.
Edinburgh in August was its usual delightful self. From mermaids terrifying tourists to people dressed as nuns or only wearing lingerie, it’s a celebration of all things art and all things silly that the human brain can come up with. No long lists of prohibited or restricted items [PDF] here, no corporate sponsorship, no sinister total policing even when the occasional incident did demand police presence. Over four million tickets are sold for the various festivals each year, not even counting unticketed events. The number of visitors to Edinburgh in August equals or exceeds the half a million (sometimes grumbling but generally cheerful) residents. Compare this to London, with its eight million population, 8.8 million Olympics tickets and only around 600,000 visitors, and you get a good idea of the fundamentally different approaches of both cities to hosting world-class events.
As I got on the train back to Newcastle on Monday morning, regrets (other than perhaps over the slight hangover I was nursing) still failed to materialise. I do wonder, though, how much better the Olympics would have been if London took a leaf out of Edinburgh’s book and put sports and fun ahead of corporate sponsorship and security theatre.
This article also appears at the Scottish Times.

Like much of the rest of the nation, I have spent the better part of the last three weeks glued to the television watching the Olympics. Olympic missiles and other civil liberties issues aside, the Games exceeded my expectations right from the opening ceremony. One highlight for me have been the amazing women athletes – not just from Team GB but from around the world. From women footballers who – unlike their male counterparts – will take a kick in the face and cheerfully keep playing, to Kate Walsh playing hockey with a broken jaw, to Sarah Attar, the first female track and field athlete from Saudi Arabia, to Nicola Adams and Katie Taylor bagging the first Olympic gold medals in women’s boxing, London 2012 has been a triumph for women’s sport.
Yet of the 29 gold medals Team GB won at London 2012, only 10 went to women (and one to the mixed-gender dressage team). Team GB’s men won nearly twice as many medals overall (40) as their female counterparts (22); and Britain’s thirteen most decorated Olympians are still all men.
Women’s sport continues to receive less funding (out of 1,449 UK Sport funded athletes, 57.2% are male) and less coverage in the UK. Football is perhaps where the contrast is most stark, with male Premier League footballers being paid up to £17 million a year whereas the FA WSL, the highest league in the women’s sport, is not even fully professionalised. Overall, women’s sport only gets 0.5% of all sponsorship money in the UK, a problem further highlighted by the recent revelation that only male rowers on the Olympic team received cars from sponsor BMW.
David Cameron has promised to extend funding for Olympic sport until Rio 2016. This is great news, but we cannot afford to continue with business as usual if we truly want to leverage the legacy of the Games for women in sport. Seeing women like Jessica Ennis, Jade Jones, Gemma Gibbons, Laura Trott, Lizzie Armitstead, Zoe Smith, and Rebecca Adlington (to name only a few) perform at the top of their field, set records and win medals will have inspired millions of girls and young women to take up sport. Seeing the huge variety of female body shapes represented in the Olympics – a lot more than we would usually see on our TV screens – and seeing women confident and happy in their bodies may perhaps even counteract some of the damage the rest of the media is doing to girls’ and women’s confidence with endless talks of dieting and plastic surgery.
Yet getting girls into sport is not enough: the far bigger challenge is retaining them through their teenage years. As girls’ bodies change and they become more self-conscious about their appearance and as different interests compete for their time, teenage girls tend to drop out of sport at a considerably faster rate than boys. Personally, I pretty much stopped doing sport at the age of 14 and didn’t pick it up again until I started kickboxing in my early 20s. In the intervening years increasing self-consciousness about my body combined with PE classes which felt more like torture did more than enough to put me off the idea of exercise. I certainly never expected in my teens that I would one day get a black belt in kickboxing (I’m currently halfway to a second one, in karate), or that I would complete a half-marathon.
Additionally, while elite sport is great, the vast majority of us – male or female – will never be Olympians. It is vital to enable grassroots sport participation and highlight role models across all levels of sport. Being able to see the steps it might take to get to the top, and that success is possible at all levels is also likely to help girls stay in sport through their teens. Yet while Victoria Pendleton, Laura Trott, Lizzie Armitstead and Shanaze Reade, alongside Chris Hoy and Bradley Wiggins, celebrated amazing achievements in cycling, London remains notoriously unsafe for cyclists, even more so for women. Members of cyclist group Critical Mass were being kettled and arrested during the Olympic opening ceremony. Addressing the abysmally bad cycling facilities in this country would be a huge step for mass participation in sport and would benefit men and women alike.
These are just some of the challenges that people like the Prime Minister, Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt and UK Sport need to address to truly leverage the Olympic legacy for everybody. For my part, I intend to put my money where my mouth is and watch women’s sport more than once every four years when the Olympics are on. Whether it’s going to see colleagues play hockey and netball, following your local women’s football club, or even just watching the Women’s FA Cup final, there at least one thing each of us can do to support women in sport.
This article is also available at Huffington Post.

We have this week witnessed sporting history with Nicola Adams becoming the first ever woman boxer to win an Olympic title. For the first time ever there are now women competing in every sport where men are competing at the Olympics. While this is a great step towards sporting equality, let’s face it, we’re still far from it. Less funding, less publicity and fewer roles for women in coaching and governance still plague women’s sport. Moreover, there are still significant gender-based differences in how some sports are practised, and there are still at least two summer Olympic sports with participation from only one gender: rhythmic gymnastics and synchronised swimming are firmly established as women-only sports.
Women have always strived to be able to compete in sports traditionally reserved for men. Road and track cycling, part of the Olympic programme for men since the first modern games in 1896, didn’t allow women competitors until 1984. As recently as the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, track cycling featured seven events for men and only three for women. Women’s weightlifting was not included until the 2000 Olympics in Sydney. Women’s boxing itself has had a more than 100-year-long campaign for inclusion in the games, starting with a demonstration bout in 1904.
So where are the campaigns to include men in traditionally “female” sports? Why do we not see men’s rhythmic gymnastics in the demonstration sports? Partly, gymnastics appears to suffer from a governing body that is painfully conservative. We can see this, for instance, in the differences between men’s and women’s artistic gymnastics. Where men compete on a variety of apparatus testing both upper and lower body strength and agility, women’s apparatus is heavily biased towards tumbling and leg-based skills with uneven bars being the only exception. Innovation and the introduction of new moves by gymnasts tends to be penalised, particularly for women. While men will routinely perform a one-armed swing on the high bar, attempts by women to introduce this into uneven bar routines have been discouraged with extremely low difficulty scores being awarded. The aesthetics of gymnastics are also highly regulated. While men generally perform in fairly plain attire, female competitors wear full make-up and sparkly leotards, which only get sparklier as you move to rhythmic gymnastics. Women are expected to perform floor routines to music and include dance moves, but men are not.
When I tweeted about the conspicuous absence of men’s rhythmic gymnastics in the Olympics, I was asked if there would even be any competitors. Japan has a strong tradition of men’s rhythmic gymnastics, and there are some male competitors in Europe too, but they are not allowed to take part in any of the major events. Moreover, in terms of skillset, there is absolutely no reason why male aerobic gymnasts couldn’t make a successful transition to rhythmic gymnastics. Still, it is true that there aren’t that many men currently in rhythmic gymnastics, whereas there are, for instance, plenty of women boxers.
We are therefore left with the old problem: things that men do are cool and to be aspired to; things that women do are marginal and niche. Women being allowed to do “men’s things” is – rightfully – celebrated as a great accomplishment for equality, but hardly any questions are being asked about men’s absence from certain fields. This state of affairs is hardly unique to sport – just look at the gender balance in nursing. The effect is the same, regardless of which gender we are barring from an activity. We are preventing individuals from fulfilling their potential. This is not just a shame for the individuals involved but for society as a whole. We’re missing out on male top talent in nursing and gymnastics just as we’re missing out on female top talent in science and technology.
One encouraging development is that newer sports being introduced to the Olympics for the first time generally tend to treat men and women equally. Mountain biking (first introduced in 1996) and BMX (2008) both do this. So does Taekwondo (2000), unlike boxing which despite now allowing women’s participation has different rules for men and women. Yet if we want true equality, we need to challenge the dinosaurs of sport such as the International Gymnastics Federation, to treat both genders equally across different variations in the sport and to encourage participation from all.
This article is also available at Huffington Post.

The story of Britain, of who the people of these islands are and how they – we, I suppose – came to be here, is hotly contested political ground right now. The Conservative part of the coalition government is trying to retell that story. From highly misleading narratives about benefits scroungers sponsored by the Prime Minister to cutting taxes for top earners and practically handing the history curriculum to right-wing historian Niall Ferguson, the story this government is telling of what Britain as a nation values is one of individualism, money, and empire.

From teasers and early coverage of rehearsals for the Olympic opening ceremony (turning the stadium into a representation of rural Britain, complete with sheep and all that), I must admit I was expecting a continuation of that story, a sequel to the sickly-sweet pageantry of the Jubilee complete with miles of bunting. Given that it was Danny Boyle running the show, I perhaps did him a disservice. Yet with everyone and everything else who has sold out to turn London into an Olympic-occupied territory with shocking restrictions on free speech, more troops deployed for the games than in Afghanistan, and the infamous Olympic missiles, I can perhaps be forgiven for having extremely low expectations of the opening ceremony.

Danny Boyle blew my socks off. Bizarre though this sounds given the £27 million cost of the show, his opening ceremony is perhaps the most overtly grassroots-political act in the Olympics since the 1968 Black Power salute. Politics and the Olympic games do tend to go hand in hand. From boycotts and counter-boycotts during the Cold War to the spectacular display of Chinese ascendency that was the Beijing Games, grand political gestures by world powers are par for the course. Yet such gestures tend to leave real people behind. Danny Boyle’s retelling of the story of Britain, on the other hand, swept us all up with it. It presented a powerful, credible image of Britain that couldn’t be more different from the Tory narrative.

From the shipping forecast to the hard labour of miners and factory workers during the industrial revolution, to successive waves of immigration, a celebration of the NHS and a jawdropping tour of British culture and music, the Britain Boyle showed us was idiosyncratic, diverse, multicultural and fun. This is after all the country that gave us the World Wide Web and gave Saudi state television its first lesbian kiss. There is a place here for everyone: black, brown or white, young or old, able-bodied or otherwise, male, female, straight, gay, born here or overseas, it is all of us who make this country the amazing place that it is. This is the Britain I fell in love with, the reason why ten years after finishing the degree I came here for I am still in this country. It is arguably also a Britain that doesn’t, strictly speaking, exist.

In between all the sound and fury, the celebration of different people and cultures coming together, there are plenty of those who do not wish for this Britain to exist. One Tory MP called the spectacle “leftie multi-cultural crap”. At the same time as winged figures cycled into the stadium in another stunning set piece, police outside were kettling and manhandling peacefully protesting cyclists. Then of course there are the aforementioned troops and Olympic missiles. Danny Boyle’s vision doesn’t quite match reality. It is, however, a representation of the best of Britain, of Britain as many of us would like it to be, of the kind of Britain many of us a working towards. At a time like this, when the story of these isles is so hotly contested, creating such a powerful, inclusive and inspirational vision, and using the greatest global marketing campaign to do so, is a truly audacious political statement.

The crowning achievement of the night was – how could it be anything else? – the lighting of the cauldron. Not one single cauldron but 204 individual petals representing the nations taking part in the Olympics. Not one single mega-star carrying the torch those final few steps but seven young athletes, lighting that Olympic flame together. At a time when individualism has practically become a religion, when we are worshipping the rich, famous and powerful, the cauldron and the seven young people who lit it are a stunning symbol of what we can achieve by working together and supporting each other. Against the backdrop of multicultural, diverse Britain which serves as a reminder that we can still be individuals, there is immense power in that image.

Danny Boyle has stuck up two fingers to the story of individualism, money and empire and given us a vision to work towards. Just when many of us have begun to wonder whether we can turn the tide of selfishness, pettiness and narrow-mindedness that seems to be sweeping the country with this government, whether we can tell a different story, Boyle has given us that story and reminded us that we, indeed, can build Jerusalem.

Note: This article is now also available on Huffington Post.

The Olympic brand is big money, and anyone who can get their hands on it gets extremely protective. LOCOG (the organising committee of this year’s games in London) is busy scrubbing the capital clean of any logos not belonging to their corporate sponsors. Their guidelines on prohibited and restricted items [PDF] ban “[a]ny objects or clothing bearing political statements or overt commercial identification” from the Olympic venues. Want to wear your Che Guevara t-shirt to the beach volleyball finals? Forget it. A number of Twitter accounts protesting or satirising the Olympics have been suspended at LOCOG’s request for fear that people my genuinely think “official protesters of the London Olympic Games” are somehow affiliated with the brand. Visa is switching off competitors’ cash points in Olympic venues, lest you get your cash for your £7 pint of Heineken (you guessed it, no other lager allowed) from the Co-operative bank. Coca Cola’s marketing chief feels this level of enforcement is “appropriate given the amount of money that the sponsors are putting in”.
Not to be left behind, the US Olympic Committee have waded in on the action – by picking on knitters of all people. Ravelry, the popular, members-only, social network for crafters, holds an annual event formerly known as the Ravelympics – a bit of highly creative, highly productive and somewhat competitive fun featuring events such as charity rowing and scarf hockey. USOC feels this infringes on their intellectual property rights.

Thus, Ravelry.com’s unauthorized use of the mark OLYMPIC or derivations thereof, such as RAVELYMPICS, may constitute trademark infringement, unfair competition and dilution of our famous trademarks.

Arguably, if you feel you can’t compete with a small, members-only social network of people wielding pointy sticks, your brand has bigger problems. To add insult to injury, USOC also contend that knitting is unworthy of being called “Olympic” (emphasis mine):

The athletes of Team USA have usually spent the better part of their entire lives training for the opportunity to compete at the Olympic Games and represent their country in a sport that means everything to them. For many, the Olympics represent the pinnacle of their sporting career. Over more than a century, the Olympic Games have brought athletes around the world together to compete in an event that has come to mean much more than just a competition between the world’s best athletes. The Olympic Games represent ideals that go beyond sport to encompass culture and education, tolerance and respect, world peace and harmony.
The USOC is responsible for preserving the Olympic Movement and its ideals within the United States. Part of that responsibility is to ensure that Olympic trademarks, imagery and terminology are protected and given the appropriate respect. We believe using the name “Ravelympics” for a competition that involves an afghan marathon, scarf hockey and sweater triathlon, among others, tends to denigrate the true nature of the Olympic Games. In a sense, it is disrespectful to our country’s finest athletes and fails to recognize or appreciate their hard work.

I am willing to bet that there are knitters on Ravelry who have spent considerably more hours perfecting their craft and making beautiful things in the process than most Olympic athletes have spent training. That is, however, beside the point. USOC’s justification for this farcical action is that, in exchange not getting any Federal funding for their activities, Congress has granted them the exclusive commercial use of the word “Olympic” and other associated bits and pieces. Which made me think that all of this ludicrous money-grabbing may present quite a neat solution for a rather different problem.
See, there is a reason that we call them “Olympic” games, and it’s that they are modelled after an event invented by the ancient Greeks which used to take place at the sanctuary of Olympia. I’m envisioning a letter from Greece to the IOC…

Dear IOC,
We note that you are using the name “Olympic” to make lots of money. We kinda have prior art on this, and we have found ourselves in a sport of financial bother. Effective immediately, we will start charging a license fee on the use of the word “Olympic” of $$millions and millions. Oh, scrap that, we’ll make it retroactive, right back to 1904.
Pay up.
Love,
Greece

Just sayin’