England Finds 2012 Olympics Don’t Spur Exercise

Meanwhile, in a country that is among the fattest in Europe, the number of couch potatoes apparently continues to grow. Surveys by Sport England indicate that the number of adults doing zero moderate sports activity rose by nearly 300,000 from 2005, when London was awarded the Olympics, to the fall of 2010. Inadequate planning, a change in government, severe funding cutbacks to sports organizations and an apparent overestimation of the impact the Olympics can have on mass participation have all forced a rethinking of England’s Olympic legacy. The latest plan, unveiled in November by the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government, omitted the one million target figure. It spoke instead of encouraging more people to take up sports through Places People Play, a program sponsored by the National Lottery. “We haven’t yet dropped the target, but we’re looking at it fairly carefully,” Hugh Robertson, Britain’s minister for sport and the Olympics, said in a telephone interview. What is needed is a more sensible way to define and measure sports and physical activity, Mr. Robertson and other sports experts said. Does walking to the bus stop count? If someone plays a pickup soccer match for 90 minutes, does that count as one sporting session or three? Anecdotal evidence suggests that more people participate in sports than surveys reveal, Mr. Robertson said. But, he added, measuring participation involves a “slightly clunky mechanism.” All Olympic bids are required to show how the Games will provide lasting benefits. Each city is allowed to devise a legacy plan. There are no specific penalties for failing to reach a target, but the fallout can undermine the reputation of a particular Winter or Summer Games and bring political opprobrium. Some critics have accused Mr. Robertson of watering down London’s post-Olympic ambitions. He replied, “That’s emphatically what we’re not trying to do.” Darryl Seibel, a spokesman for the British Olympic Association, said sports and government officials were determined to leave a meaningful legacy from the London Games and to transform plans “from rhetoric to reality.” London is hardly the first host city to struggle with its Olympic legacy. In truth, international events like the Olympics and soccer’s World Cup leave a greater discernible impact on infrastructure than on sports. Roads, airports and rail systems are improved while a number of stadiums become white elephants and lingering sporting benefits remain indistinct. Six years after Albertville, France, hosted the 1992 Winter Olympics, the figure-skating arena and speed-skating oval there were fenced off and abandoned. The magnificent Olympic stadium showcased during the 2008 Beijing Games, known as the Bird’s Nest, was seldom being used a year and a half later. In London, there has been heated debate about whether its $854 million Olympic Stadium should be demolished after 17 days’ use and replaced with a soccer stadium or downsized and left as an arena that could host both soccer and track and field. The second option prevailed Friday in a vote by the company in charge of the Games’ legacy. Research on the Olympic Games stimulating mass participation in sports has not produced encouraging results. In 2007, the Culture, Media and Sport Committee of the British House of Commons concluded that “no host country has yet been able to demonstrate a direct benefit from the Olympic Games in the form of a lasting increase in participation.” A study of the 2000 Sydney Games showed that while seven Olympic sports experienced a slight increase afterward in Australia, nine showed a decline. After the 2002 Commonwealth Games, held in Manchester, England, “there appears to have been no recorded impact on sports participation levels” in the country’s northwest, Fred Coalter, a professor of sports studies at the University of Stirling in Scotland, wrote before London won the 2012 Olympic bid.