A TARNISHED FLAME?
News from Oxfordshire about the Olympic Torch Relay is disturbing. Not content with providing some obscure American warbler by the bizarre name of Will.i.am. with the honour of being a guest torch-bearer on a stint in Taunton, an even greater tarnishing of the flame has emerged from Oxford.
Residents and community leaders have criticised plans by Coca~Cola to fly over 22 even more obscure Americans to carry the torch in Oxfordshire, in preference to local people who had been nominated for the `honour` to recognise the contributions they have made to their communities. Coca~Cola are, of course, one of the main sponsors for the Olympics and as such have been allocated 1350 torch-bearer `places` with over 100 of them coming from overseas.
This episode seems to sum up much of what the Olympics is about these days - with multi-national companies turning it into a vast marketing and advertising campaign, getting further and further away from the Olympic ideal and upsetting genuinely disappointed local people along the way. In a way it doesn`t surprise me as it seems to go along with all the other Olympic absurdities - the VIP treatment, the freebies, the fawning to `leaders` in politics and sports governing bodies, inflated ticket prices, the crass `merchandising` and all the rest.
Maybe it would be a good idea to scrap the Torch Relay tokenism altogether. I see it`s due to pass about five miles from where I live before long, in a curious arrangement whereby it appears out of nowhere at one end of a nearby village from where a `relay` of three torch-bearers will take it 800 yards down the road before it is bussed off to its next venue which might be Sevenoaks or Guildford. By such arrangements, the incentive to go and see it is lost, along with any significance it might have had and this, together with the Oxford and Taunton examples, tarnish and diminish still further any sense there might have been that the Torch Relay matters.
Residents and community leaders have criticised plans by Coca~Cola to fly over 22 even more obscure Americans to carry the torch in Oxfordshire, in preference to local people who had been nominated for the `honour` to recognise the contributions they have made to their communities. Coca~Cola are, of course, one of the main sponsors for the Olympics and as such have been allocated 1350 torch-bearer `places` with over 100 of them coming from overseas.
This episode seems to sum up much of what the Olympics is about these days - with multi-national companies turning it into a vast marketing and advertising campaign, getting further and further away from the Olympic ideal and upsetting genuinely disappointed local people along the way. In a way it doesn`t surprise me as it seems to go along with all the other Olympic absurdities - the VIP treatment, the freebies, the fawning to `leaders` in politics and sports governing bodies, inflated ticket prices, the crass `merchandising` and all the rest.
Maybe it would be a good idea to scrap the Torch Relay tokenism altogether. I see it`s due to pass about five miles from where I live before long, in a curious arrangement whereby it appears out of nowhere at one end of a nearby village from where a `relay` of three torch-bearers will take it 800 yards down the road before it is bussed off to its next venue which might be Sevenoaks or Guildford. By such arrangements, the incentive to go and see it is lost, along with any significance it might have had and this, together with the Oxford and Taunton examples, tarnish and diminish still further any sense there might have been that the Torch Relay matters.
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