The Olympics is a puzzling phenomenon. I came to this conclusion reading a news report about the legacy of the 2012 London games. It said there basically wasn’t one. The family gathered nervously to hear the reading of the will only to learn that the bejewelled old dowager had pissed everything away ante-mortem. No urban regeneration for Great Nephew the Lee Valley, no sustained increase in trade for dodgy Uncle Tourism and nothing of any real value for kindly Cousin Shortage of Affordable Housing. No inheritance but debts and a drawer full of useless trinkets (stadiums).
I realise this metaphor is screaming like an Elizabethan Catholic under interrogation, but it wasn’t me who coined the phrase “Olympic legacy”. I just copied it to try and sound modern. That’s what we media types have to do when we enter middle age, as well as pretending we can work our phones and buying fashionable spectacles.
Speaking of fashionable spectacles, the opening and closing ceremonies of the 2012 Olympics did actually have perceptible legacies, or positive consequences, according to the article I read. They caused happiness spikes in the London population – so, in bequest terms, more a round of drinks at the wake than the deeds to a Kensington townhouse, but still worth having.
And with that, I declare the legacy metaphor to have died on the rack without betraying the whereabouts of any fellow Jesuits. And with that, I also announce the passing of the metaphor I’ve been using to refer to the legacy metaphor. It’s been a difficult time and we need to move on.
These happiness spikes were apparently part of a broader elevation of Londoners’ moods caused by the Olympics. This fact has been established by a team of “happiness researchers”, led by Paul Dolan, professor of behavioural sciences at LSE, and Georgios Kavetsos of Queen Mary University of London. They interviewed 9,000 people in London, Berlin and Paris over a three-year period around the London games in an attempt to measure their sense of wellbeing with and without the Olympian fillip. They found that Londoners became significantly happier from summer/autumn 2012 onwards, though their happiness fell back to normal levels within a year.
The way the researchers quantified this was interesting. They said the rise in people’s level of satisfaction was equivalent to the mood improvement caused by an £8,000 pay rise. If that’s genuinely true of all 8 million Londoners then the £8.9bn the games cost is quite an inexpensive way of making the city feel like it’s received a £64bn windfall. But the effect is temporary. As Kavetsos put it: “Like any party, you have a great time but the following day you wake up with a hangover.”
Which brings us to the billion dollar question – or rather the £8.9bn question – is hosting the Olympics worth it? “If you want to host a party, host a party and do that. It’s fine,” says Kavetsos. “The problem with events such as the Olympics is they come with all these claims that they are going to boost jobs and the economy. If you look at the literature, that isn’t true.”
This is what puzzled me. Our society, most would agree, does not underrate the importance of money. Money is deemed, usually rightly, to be behind everything, to be insidious and pervasive. Even those who lust after power are suspected of secretly lusting after money more. Money is the ultimate ulterior motive.
Yet, according to Kavetsos’s persuasive analysis, where the Olympics is concerned, the situation is reversed. Money isn’t the ulterior motive for hosting the Olympics, it’s the ostensible reason. Money, in the form of economic prosperity and urban regeneration, is what’s set out, front and centre, as why a city should hold the games. The evidence shows, however, that this money, this greater long-term prosperity, hardly ever materialises. But people still want to host the games. What, then, is the ulterior motive?
It’s partly money too, probably. The Olympics may not make cities wealthier, but any given Olympiad enriches many individuals. A lot of public money always flows into private hands, both legitimately and corruptly. Those people can honestly say “The Olympics will make us richer” and only have to start lying if pressed for a specific definition of “us”.
But my hunch is there’s more to it than that. I think a big part of the ulterior motive, the unspoken reason, for wanting to host the games is simply that people really want to host the games. They want to do it because they think it’s exciting and fun and good. But those reasons sound feeble or untrue to cynical contemporary ears. On one level, we think avarice is shameful, but on another, we think it’s the only sensible or believable reason for doing anything. The apparent absence of avarice, we suspect, is just conclusive proof of the lurking presence of sloth, envy and pride.
“You can’t put a price on happiness,” we airily say, but we don’t mean it. We think you can and, in their study, these happiness researchers actually have. A moderate increase in happiness because of a successful civic event is worth eight grand, they say. I’m sure we could get them to price up some other stuff: falling in love, having a child, a crisp autumn day, a satisfying fart. Or, in the debit column, the death of a grandparent, getting beaten up, an awkward silence in a social situation. It could all be expressed in monetary terms.
Since the dawn of time, humans have wanted to quantify things. So we’ve invented hundreds of units of measurement – kilograms, pints, amps, miles, hours, miles per hour – but it seems we’re now trying to use currency as the overall measurement, the uber-unit, the way of quantifying the whole human experience.
It might have been better for Britain if Shakespeare had died poor. The fact that England’s, and the world’s, greatest writer was also financially astute skews how we rate those skills. People mention his business acumen as often as his sonnets. It almost makes us forget that the man’s only genius was for writing. The big house and the second best bed and all that are just antiquarian colour. His affluence adds nothing to his contribution.
We might be more willing to put money in its place if something as indisputably worthwhile as Shakespeare’s oeuvre hadn’t also turned a financial profit. It might allow us to remember the unifying, lovable, slick, magnificent, friendly, joyous, expensive success of London 2012 without forcing ourselves to add a tinge of regret.
