Almost every secondary school gym is set up for basketball. I find watching it fairly boring - it's just one score after another - but it's enjoyable to play, healthy and rewarding from the highest level of skill to the most modest. Mostly, however we decided to finance it, we could guarantee being thrashed by the Americans, so we are a very, long stride from medal contention ........ but Croatia is good at basketball ffs ........
We pump loadsamoney into equestrian sports swollen with rich, white people competing almost exclusively against rich, white people from other countries at which we've necessarily a very good chance of winning. It's all about whose mummy and daddy can buy the best horse anyway. And after all the Jamaicans are hardly likely to discover a penchant for Puissance, or the Ethiopians a love affair with Dressage ......... so we know our limited rivals inside out.
We are a country in which we are meltdown because I can see about seven flakes of snow floating past my window. Yet we see nothing ironic in expecting to win against Johnny Foreigner in snow sports, even though he's seeing seven foot of the stuff drifting outside his window. We are nature's imperialists - if the wind changed for ten minutes we'd be back colonising India.
But if we changed the nature of lottery funding so it could be used in other ways what would we do? Divert the Curling cash to renewing Trident, put it towards another useless arm of HS2 to join up some strange terminal outside London, with some other station positioned neatly in former ancient woodland between two northern cities George Osborne has decided to torture into becoming a powerhouse? Or maybe it could go into education so that when there are no jobs on the checkout at Morrisons the unemployable graduates can ponder whether they might have read the whole of Marcuse's One Dimensional Man instead of stealing that quotation from Wikipedia?
We pump loadsamoney into equestrian sports swollen with rich, white people competing almost exclusively against rich, white people from other countries at which we've necessarily a very good chance of winning. It's all about whose mummy and daddy can buy the best horse anyway. And after all the Jamaicans are hardly likely to discover a penchant for Puissance, or the Ethiopians a love affair with Dressage ......... so we know our limited rivals inside out.
We are a country in which we are meltdown because I can see about seven flakes of snow floating past my window. Yet we see nothing ironic in expecting to win against Johnny Foreigner in snow sports, even though he's seeing seven foot of the stuff drifting outside his window. We are nature's imperialists - if the wind changed for ten minutes we'd be back colonising India.
But if we changed the nature of lottery funding so it could be used in other ways what would we do? Divert the Curling cash to renewing Trident, put it towards another useless arm of HS2 to join up some strange terminal outside London, with some other station positioned neatly in former ancient woodland between two northern cities George Osborne has decided to torture into becoming a powerhouse? Or maybe it could go into education so that when there are no jobs on the checkout at Morrisons the unemployable graduates can ponder whether they might have read the whole of Marcuse's One Dimensional Man instead of stealing that quotation from Wikipedia?