THE LITTLE ceremony in which my sons received their swimming awards was unusually emotional last week. It wasn’t just maternal pride that they had passed their ASA Levels 4 and 5 — sponsored by that health-giving panacea Frosties — but dismay, anger even, that I probably won’t be sewing any more badges on to trunks for a very long time.
The private school in which my sons learnt to swim has abruptly closed all its lovely facilities — gym, pool, tennis courts, acres of playing fields — to the local community. And so 120 children have lost their Saturday morning swimming lessons, the little girl gymnasts who train almost every evening have to move on and hundreds of children who enjoyed the school holiday sports camps will have to find somewhere else to acquire the art of spin bowling.
The school’s reasons are opaque — health and safety mutterings — and, hey, it’s a business and has to put its own fee-paying pupils first. But on the Saturday after London had won the Olympics this felt a somewhat mean-spirited decision.
Here in the Olympics Minister Tessa Jowell’s constituency, across the river from the gazillion-quid 2012 complex, it isn’t easy raising a potential Olympic champion. With our private swimming lessons cancelled, my sons could use council facilities, if the borough’s showpiece pool, opened only seven years ago, were not closed for 12 months because the underground pipes are cracked and the water drains away. The once-elegant Victorian Camberwell Baths were allowed to crumble once Peckham was built and are so dilapidated that rain drips on to my mother-in-law’s yoga class. School swimming lessons? At our state primary, only enjoyed by children in Year 3.
But my sons will be fine. I’ll shell out to join the sports club of another private school. (The girls’ school looks equipped to stage the Olympics on its own.) And their granny has a friend with her own pool. Yet what of the many other children in our impoverished borough? Forget gold medals, will some even learn enough to save themselves from drowning?
What irony that in our newly crowned Olympic nation, local authorities still do not have a statutory obligation to provide sports facilities. Sport is seen as a luxury. It receives what is left in the pot after education, housing and social services have taken what they need. And in places like Southwark that is not much.
In the 1990s, when Lord Olympics himself, Seb Coe, was a Tory MP, his Government allowed facilities to be underfunded to death, sports fields to be sold off to developers, parks to become run-down and dangerous. But how much has changed? While magic Olympic money will benefit elite athletics, community sports may even suffer. London councils such as mine — too far away for its population to enjoy the new facilities — will pay a levy that will effectively decrease its own sports budget.
It took three years for Southwark to raise a mere £2.5 million so that schoolchildren could have an athletics track. Now there are fears that resources will drain towards the Olympics away from grassroots schemes, like water from Peckham’s pool.
Meanwhile, a mile away, the 1948 Olympic velodrome at Herne Hill, a training ground for the cycling gold medal-winner Bradley Wiggins, among many others, has been shut for six months, its buildings close to collapse, its summer programme for young cyclists cancelled. Saving it will require more than money. It will need goodwill from a bunch of well-heeled Nimbys who, it seems, would rather the velodrome rotted than the site be developed to pay for its upkeep.
In Britain, sporting facilities are seen as fripperies, the hang-outs of a few nut-bag enthusiasts, the first things to go when budgets are tight. Exercise is regarded as a trial, something to be avoided, not the transformative force any parent who has seen a child rushing in from a swimming lesson, bright-eyed, alert and endorphin-happy, knows it to be. Closing a swimming pool is shrugged off as a sensible saving, rather than the death of public pleasure.
But excellent, local and affordable sport — made the duty of every council, as it is in France — could transform our porky offspring faster than an army of Jamie Olivers. It would reduce youth crime more effectively than 10,000 ASBOs. And, for those glory-seekers in government, it would throw millions more contenders into the pool of talent from which we choose our 2012 Olympic team. Cancel the swimming-badge ceremonies and Britain might as well forget the winner’s podium.
Out of Africa
This summer’s rainy-day must-see movie is Madagascar, a cartoon about New York zoo animals being sent into the wild. But watching it last week, I grew more irritated with every frame. With barely any plot, the whole film rests, for children, on the zany “charms” of the animals and for their parents in the dubious thrill of spotting knowing references.
You really know a children’s movie is bankrupt when it features a pastiche of an adult one. And Madagascar contains the rose-petal scene in American Beauty but with the lion imagining himself covered in steaks.
It struck me that, although Madagascar is heading for box-office glory and possibly an animation Oscar, I may as well have stuck my sons in front of two mindless hours of the Cartoon Network. Toy Story, Shrek and The Incredibles will be watched in 100 years for their originality. But I am tired of this derivative laziness in cartoon money-spinners, in which every sidekick sounds like Shrek’s donkey and plots, not merely the animation, seem computer generated.
Cartoons are largely passive entertainment. By contrast after watching Danny Boyle’s much under-rated Millions, about children who discover a cache of stolen money, my sons emerged from the cinema, debating what they would do. Hand it in? Give it to a good cause? Splurge it on PlayStations and Kit Kats? The film even led me to explain — rather feebly — the debate about Britain joining the euro. Kids don’t always want mindless schlock: like adults they thirst for stories in which they are the heroes.
Fashion statement
At a party of magazine editors there was some discussion of a summer trend that can only be attempted by the young, slender and “fashion forward”. This year the cutting edge look is “urban shorts” with high heels. My friend and I admired the incredibly chic and perky posterior of the editor of Cosmopolitan, clad in black silky knee-lengths, teamed with elegant stilettos. And then we shook our heads. “No matter what fashion people tell you,” said my friend. “Some things will always remain just plain wrong.”
janice.turner@thetimes.co.uk
