London 2012: Britain's Olympic gold rush provides a lesson for politics

The work ethic, sacrifice and sense of belonging of our athletes should remind our leaders there is a different Britain
    • The Guardian,
    • Jump to comments ()
London 2012 Olympic Games - Athletics - Women's Heptathlon
Jessica Ennis with her gold medal for the heptathlon. Action Images/John Sibley

Broken Britain? Not a lot of obvious signs of it over the weekend, were there? Gold-medal-winning Britons of all backgrounds and ethnicities and an Olympic Games in which, despite all the gleeful predictions of chaos and typical British incompetence, huge crowds enjoyed well-run days. Every finger is crossed, but so far it's gone like clockwork.

Of course in so many ways we like the Olympics because it seems the antithesis of politics, indeed the opposite of so much of messy, compromised, mixed-motive daily life. It's fast. It's clear-cut. It's hyper-dramatic. There is a clarity, almost a purity, to the win-or-lose, gold-silver-bronze, the daily tot-up of medals. Touch a 10th of a second behind, and that's it. For a month at least, we can pretend to live in a simpler world. It has heroes but hardly any villains.

Yet the Olympics is and always has been a highly political event, with political lessons to be drawn from it about success and failure – and about nationhood. Its nationalism harks back to the modern origins of the games. In 1896, the world wars were yet to come. Idealism and flag-waving went together; it seems trickier now.

These days the true stories of "national" success are more complex too. So many athletes, particularly from smaller countries, train for years overseas, with foreign coaches and foreign funding. Even beyond the opportunistic passport snaffling that's gone on for decades – remember Zola Budd? – many gold medals are won thanks to training camps far from the territory whose national anthem is played.

Yet there are national lessons to be drawn. One is that, still, two very different systems are pitted against each other. One is authoritarian, centralist and utterly focused on winning the maximum number of medals for reasons of ideological pride – to make the old men at home look good. In the old days, it was the Soviet bloc that picked out kids and drove them frantically hard in specialist sports centres; now it's the Chinese. The other system is more chaotic, capitalist – but also more open to migration.

The US, France, Brazil and Britain have perhaps the most multi-ethnic teams, and do richly well from their relative openness. Mo Farah, who came here from Mogadishu aged eight, is a British hero. Jessica Ennis's father was from Jamaica and her mother from Derbyshire; a very British heroine. Team GB embraces minor royalty, public schoolboys, kids from the rougher parts of town and new immigrants. For once, in an uncomplicated way, let's just feel good about that.

And British medals are emphatically not about making the politicians look good. What guff this is about Boris Johnson floating on a wave of national euphoria into Downing Street; what nonsense about a longer-term polling boost for David Cameron (who, poor man, seems to have become a reverse-talisman, an albatross of a supporter whom the nation needs to stay away). Politics is unlikely to benefit from Olympic success. We credit the athletes for being good athletes and we look at politicians with the same cold suspicion we did before.

There are, though, political lessons, which are worth learning. For the Olympics does relate to ordinary life in multiple ways. London 2012 has vindicated Labour politicians who worked hard to bring the Games here and confounded the naysayers. The opening ceremony mixed wry and sugary in a way only Britain can do. The worst failures, notably the security fiasco, took place in the private, not the public, sector.

So much is fairly obvious. Far from this being a government success, or Boris's big achievement, it was a Labour idea brought to fruition by Conservatives such as Sebastian Coe, who have been notably consensual and non-partisan. Yet I think there is a much deeper political , or perhaps a lesson about values, that every party needs to ponder.

Why have we been doing so well? It isn't something in the water, or the bracing effect of the weather, or of the British constitution. The athletes achieved what they did because they worked ferociously hard, in training teams and groups that were well led and produced a deep sense of belonging and loyalty. Listen to the winners talking about these teams – their coaches, their running or riding partners, their friends. Listen to the losers apologising first to the people they "let down" and taking all responsibility for failure on their own shoulders.

That's what's moved me. That's where I think there are the best lessons to carry back into our ordinary lives. Nothing beats a sense of belonging and purpose – not money, not fame, not celebrity. The athletes worked for years to be here – years of getting up in the darkness and pounding streets or water, years of boring routine in gymnasiums and velodromes; years of forgoing nights out, alcohol or relaxing holidays; years of massage for screaming muscles; and years of repetitive gym work.

These people are all living embodiments of deferred gratification, putting in the self-denial and hard work for the chance of glory. They're the opposite of the gimme-now, look-at-me, celebrity B-list fame academy set we keep being told epitomises modern Britain. If it looks egotistical – the man or woman running with the flag draped around their shoulders in front of 80,000 people – it's really a story of graft, and of group loyalty.

That's because the graft can't happen without the team, the trainers, the leadership and the camaraderie. Almost every athlete I've heard or watched reflecting says so. That isn't individualism; it's the opposite. And if we take those two things –the hard work, and the importance of group loyalty and sacrifice (including all the fine athletes who give up medal chances of their own to partner, pace or protect), then we have the glimpse of a different Britain.

There will be no easy, quick-fix, sugar-rush economic boost from the Olympic Games. It would be childish to expect it. But there's the real lesson. The American sociologist Robert Putnam famously argued in his book Bowling Alone that by shunning clubs, unions and group activities of all kinds in favour of a selfish individualism, westerners were impoverishing their societies and their lives. If Britain's remarkable per-capita success at these Games teaches us anything, it's that when we bowl together, we bowl better.

Twitter: @jackieashley

Latest posts

Today's best video

Today in pictures