Kaustav Battacharya/Creative Commons
I'm glad London's protesters roughed up the Olympic torch and generally made a farce of the relay yesterday: anything else would have been shameful. What a ridiculous, disgraceful proceeding this was! How the Olympic committee dare try to sell this as some sort of idealistic ritual, I have no idea. All right: had the torch-bearers all been distinguished Olympians, as to be fair some of them, like David Hemery, certainly were, then I might have gone along with the feelgood spiel. But they weren't. Konnie Huq may be a lovely girl in many ways, and one of those ways was her sensible attitude to the protest (she said she could understand whay the protesters acted as they did), although I'd rather she had decided to withdraw, as she'd considered doing. But anyway, what does she have to do with sport? And what about Denise van Outen? Why was she there? Why Trevor McDonald, for god's sake? Why Vanessa Mae? Even some of the sportsmen taking part were objectionable, like Theo Walcott, whose lack of significant achievement in his admittedly short footballing career was clearly less important to the relay organisers than his youth, his fame, and his unearned wealth of distinctly unolympian proportions. This was no sporting celebration, but a sleb-culture fest in the cause of sales.
And sales not only of Olympic tickets, but I'm sorry to say of the communist régime in China. The most objectionable torch carrier of all was the Chinese ambassador - what's her sporting claim to fame? And the most repellent aspect of the whole day was the sight of Chinese security guards on the streets of London teaming up with the Met to prevent justified protests in the cause of human rights.
If China wants to continue to oppress Tibet, and lie about what it's doing; if it wants to keep its own population free of freedoms and resist democracy - then it has to expect the world to behave badly at its parties. And if the Olympic committee wants nice, enthusiastic, smiling crowds at its torch rallies, then it should never again award its games as a goody-bag to a tyrannical government like Hitler's, or the one now in Peking.
I wish they had put that bloody torch out.
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