Board index ‹ Super League ‹ Leeds Rhinos - southstander.com ‹ Olympic Torch Farce

Sporty and active is all very good, but you really need to be competitive and have some measure of skill in your chosen sport to get the best out of it. Being humped 7 nil out on the football pitch on a regular basis, is hardly the way forward if you want to keep a youngster interested.

It's a shame that a combination of Politically Correct headteachers who banned the end of term school games, and that short sighted policy of selling off school playing fields has denied so many kids of that great simple feeling of being winners.

And all without the subterfuge,obscene costs, political chicanery and outright cheating that passes for The Olympics nowadays.....

BillyRhino wrote:

Sporty and active is all very good, but you really need to be competitive and have some measure of skill in your chosen sport to get the best out of it. Being humped 7 nil out on the football pitch on a regular basis, is hardly the way forward if you want to keep a youngster interested.

It's a shame that a combination of Politically Correct headteachers who banned the end of term school games, and that short sighted policy of selling off school playing fields has denied so many kids of that great simple feeling of being winners.

And all without the subterfuge,obscene costs, political chicanery and outright cheating that passes for The Olympics nowadays.....

A very outdated view that doesn't any longer hold truth. The School Games has 4 levels from local school competion all the way to the national finals known as the Uk School Games, competitive school sport is thriving!

I'd be very interested to know what is the cost, per tax payer, for the games?

What's the issue, Jeff, with able bodied claimants of JSA being asked to earn that allowance during the games?

McLaren_Field wrote:

Gareth - these 70,000 jobs, are these the "real jobs" that you were talking about ?

I wasn't talking about them. I didn''t introduce the term, I asked the poster who did to clarify it.

Do you take issue with the figures Seth has quoted with 200,000 jobs for the games itself compared to 70,000 volunteers?

McLaren_Field wrote:

You know, there is a really interesting statistic that places everything into context...

In 1948 London held its second Olympic Games and has entered folklore as "The Austerity Games", the government of the day accepting the invitation to host the games on the proviso that, in a country ravaged by war debt and with a huge infrastructure rebuilding plan to finance, no additional money would be provided for sporting facilities or indeed the hosting of the athletes - British athletes were even sent the cloth and told to make their own shorts and shirts.

In 1948 the NHS came into being and in its first year it had running costs of £248million, a figure which if adjusted for inflation number crunching provided here is equivalent to £7.63billion in todays money.

So,

Lasting legacies then...

£7.6billion on a National Health Service for the next 64 years

£9.6billion on seventeen days of (sometimes) obscure sports

Do you think the money would have been spent on the NHS had we not been awarded the Olympics?

Seth wrote:

A very outdated view that doesn't any longer hold truth. The School Games has 4 levels from local school competion all the way to the national finals known as the Uk School Games, competitive school sport is thriving!

Excellent news. Can't beat having a trophy or your photo in the paper! Just a shame we can't raze all those housing estates and turn them back into playing fields.

[McLaren_Field]

G1 wrote:

Do you take issue with the figures Seth has quoted with 200,000 jobs for the games itself compared to 70,000 volunteers?

Not at all, its great news and if I read Seth's post correctly the Games have created 130,000 paid jobs during the events - fantastic news.

What do we do in September ?

[McLaren_Field]

G1 wrote:

Do you think the money would have been spent on the NHS had we not been awarded the Olympics?

i don't know, £10,000,000,000 is a lot of money, some of it could have been spent on the NHS, some could have gone towards getting every child of school age to have a face-to-face personal interview with David Beckham in order to inspire them with the equivalent of an Olympic Games style fervour for sport, there would probably have been enough left in the pot to buy them all a skipping rope too, and then some.

[McLaren_Field]

G1 wrote:

I'd be very interested to know what is the cost, per tax payer, for the games?

What's the issue, Jeff, with able bodied claimants of JSA being asked to earn that allowance during the games?

You could work it out really easily yourself, just google the number of UK taxpayers, deduct Jimmy Carr and Phillip Green from the number, and then divide into £9,600,000,000.

As far as JSA is concerned, no-one should be asked to work in order to receive JSA, indeed if an individual decides that they can work (even for free) whilst in receipt of JSA then they'll find themselves in deep trouble - you're even supposed to declare when you go away to visit relatives for a few days or go on holiday.

Its Job Seekers Allowance, max £65 per week to pay the expenses incurred when looking for work, pays for bus fares to interviews, a clean shirt, that sort of thing but its absolutely dependant on you actively seeking work and the theory goes that if you are already working somewhere then you are not actively seeking work and should not be claiming the benefit.

Always has been thus and for a government to start requesting job seekers to work for their job seekers allowance would be / is (because its already happening) a national disgrace - you can't prosecute jobseekers for doing the same thing that HM Gov is requesting them to do, its either not permissible or it is permissible .

McLaren_Field wrote:

What do we do in September ?

I'll be taking a trip to Germany, moaning about the build up of traffic now the kids are back at school and reflecting upon a wonderful summer of sport.

You?