By James Emmett

It is very easy to scoff indignantly at the government'’s decision to increase funding for the Olympic opening and closing ceremonies by over 100 per cent. And when on the morning of 5th December David Cameron himself gave the go-ahead to raise the fireworks budget for London’s Olympics by £41 million, a nation did indeed sputter into its coffee. And with good reason. LOCOG, the organisers of the London Games, sensibly pledged in the immediate aftermath of the Beijing Olympics in 2008 that they would not attempt to compete with the scale, nor the cost, of their Chinese predecessor's’ breath-taking ceremonial efforts. Indeed, funding for the ceremonies is supposed to come from LOCOG'’s own privately sourced revenue – from sponsorship, ticketing, merchandise sales or from the IOC itself. Public money is dedicated to infrastructural investment, venue building and security, not on bombastic, Danny Boyle-directed jamborees. Nevertheless, culture secretary Jeremy Hunt has now promised a “mind-blowing” opening ceremony to go alongside the £39 million promotional campaign to be rolled out around the world in time for the Olympics.

One of the fundamental drivers behind London'’s victory in its 2005 bid to host the Games was the wide-ranging legacy plan, key to which was the pledge to inspire a new generation of, if not sporting heroes, then at least healthy, active young people. The building blocks were already in place to deliver on that. According to the Guardian, between 2003 and 2010, secondary school children playing two hours or more of sport a week rose from 20 per cent to 85 per cent as school sports partnerships were built.
The coalition government, however, announced in 2010 that it would be withdrawing £162 million in funding for school sports, cutting the ring-fenced national budget for school sport by half and abandoning an inherited target to increase the number of people playing regular sport by one million by 2013. It is galling, one would imagine, for those PE teachers and sports coaches now out of work in this Olympic year, to see extra money being plunged into what is essentially a marketing budget.

In fairness, however, the extra ceremony money will come from the contingency fund within the £9.3 billion pot already allocated to the Games, not siphoned away from some other needy facet of our creaking national budget. What is clear, nonetheless, is that, at the highest level, the Games have undergone a metamorphosis. No longer are they about inspiring people to take up sport, to integrate it into their daily lives; instead, they are to become a month-long advert for Britain (which, for different reasons, is what the Beijing Games were supposed to be for China).

Upon announcing the extra £41 million for the ceremonies, Minister for Sport and the Olympics Hugh Robertson told the BBC the money was an investment to "drive the maximum benefit for the economy and for tourism: "That's why we've invested that £41 million,” he said. “It's about the impression that people take away of this country. And we hope it's an impression that people will say 'we want to come back here, do business and spend tourism money’."

Culture secretary Jeremy Hunt put it this way when questioned about the need for such a large promotional fund around the Games: "We have to be prepared that there might be some sniping and unpopularity in investing in banging the drum for Britain when times are tough but what people want is a government that will get the country back on its feet," he said. "If you don't grasp an opportunity like this I really think you'll be betraying a generation.”

Perhaps when times are tough then, the need to inculcate a healthy, active lifestyle in an increasingly sedentary young population becomes something of a ‘soft target’ behind the more pressing concern of ensuring they all have jobs to go into.

James Emmett (author of this blog) is deputy editor of SportsPro magazine, the leading publication for the global sports industry. Published monthly, the magazine focuses on all the commercial, political and organisational aspects of sport worldwide.