Would you press the ‘cancel the Olympics’ button?

GlasWolf

filevans wrote: »

if an option to cancel it was there originally before all the vast amount of money had been spent then that would be a reasonable option

As the poll says, "...as if we’d never got it in the first place...".

I'm actually surprised there's so much support for it given that it cost £12 billion (from an original estimate of £2 billion, yet somehow it's still "under budget"). Not only that but there's plenty of complaints that money is being diverted from grass-roots sporting causes that would be of far greater benefit to the population as a whole, and particularly for young people. What's more, there's no reliable evidence of any economic or social benefits arising from staging an event like this.

It reminds me of the "spend what you can't afford" culture that the politicians were so eager to blame for the recession in the first place. I'm not a whinger and am a sports fan (though not really track and field); I just think there's far better ways to spend £12 billion from the nation's coffers than a 3-week sporting event and tidying up some bits of London.

hasselhof

No I wouldn't hit the cancel button, we should be proud of our athletes

Beetlemama

No Olympics in our household if we can help it, though that's not easy since it's everywhere, on everything, you can't even get a bowl of cereal or a tampax without it being on the box, lol, seriously.

We don't watch football or tennis or any other sports all the rest of the year, we're just not interested in it. What actually bothers me though is that it's the school holidays and I'd have liked to take our son to the museums and that in London again this year (now it's stopped raining), but with the increased threat of terrorism we are going to leave it this year.

Stephen_Leak

Of course not, the money's been spent. And the daily blunders are entertaining.

hellenjc

I love sport but detest the way successive Olympic games have been turned into "lets see who can spend the most money on the opening ceremony" which was brilliant but why wouldn't it be when money was no object in a time when the NHS for example ( which I work in ) is in dire straits along with many, many other areas of society.
The Olympic games are now the Corporate Olympic Games because they are the ones really running the show.
The fact that people in residential areas have surface-to-air missiles on their roof against their will is appalling. When it happens in other countries we call that using Human Shields. Maybe we wouldn't need quite so much "protection" if successive governments hadn't been quite so warmongering !
I have friends who live not far from the Olympic village and they're practically in lockdown and have been for weeks.
One of the sponsors is Dow Chemicals who bought out Union Carbide in 2001. Union Carbide were responsible for the terrible Bhopal deaths. Read about Dow here http://www.rt.com/news/olympics-bhopal-games-dow-disaster-160/
I have nothing against the sports people taking part, I think their efforts are simply marvellous but all the above has really tainted the games in my eyes.
Shame on the organisers.
There needs to be thought about how the Olympics moves forward but I'm sure there won't be.