Don’t change your reality: How Team GB’s slippery attitude played its part in Britain’s divisions | Team GB

MAnaging Victory while the world burns. The British Olympic Association has an impressively large selection of mottos and slogans at its disposal. Even the main competition name, “Team GB”, is in fact a cool slogan, a mid-1990s rebranding of UK plc’s Summer Sports division.

In addition, we have a full list, many of which are already safely registered: Believe in Extraordinary. Pride the Lion. The Lion Awakens. Patriotic Lion Alternatives For A Brighter British Tomorrow. On closer inspection, the last few of these might well be slogans for the current spate of British nationalist movements that, in an unfortunate coincidence, tend to have a similar vibe, vocabulary, and big cat imagery.

But it’s not hard to see how some of these slogans can get a little muddled in practice. For members of the British press at this Olympics, Managing Victory was the Team GB buzzphrase, the subject line of regular daily emails detailing the latest Team GB results for Team GB. Over the past week, however, those Managing Victory emails have often appeared among a whole load of other GB-related inbox content.

More riots planned, three prisoners for violent disorder was a typical subject line under a note from Managing Victory about more medal successes for Team GB on the track. Within far-right ideology as riots in UK cause chaos provided an interesting counterbalance to Managing Victory’s breathtaking news about Team GB’s mixed triathlon gold medal winners.

And now the Managing Victory thing has become just a small comment in the sense of two completely separate worlds in flux. On one side we have the Team GB-verse, an orderly, slick, functional place where healthy, smiling people show British courage and British unity, where the atmosphere is one of podium-waving, medal-chewing, National Lottery-thanksgiving, the whole cloudless iconography of elite achievement success.

On the other hand we have what, for want of a better term, we must call the Real World: the real Britain, which doesn’t seem to be a team at all, but is divided, fearful and in fact falling apart.

This is the experience of covering these Games from the bubble of Paris 2024. There is a fundamental cognitive dissonance in flying around the forcibly pacified streets of the most illuminated city in the world, dashing from dome to stadium to park, blinded by sunlight, drunk on $10 billion of expertly staged sporting spectacle.

Meanwhile, the phone in your pocket keeps pinging with the latest horror from your home country. Four hundred arrests. A community centre has been burnt down. People are throwing stones at mosques. Australia, Nigeria, Malaysia and Indonesia have warned their citizens not to visit the UK because, frankly, that’s where it all started. Hmm. Airman’s medal warning, you say?

Even stranger, there seems to be an unspoken agreement that these two separate planes of existence are never to be mentioned in the same room. As they surely would if, say, the England national football team were playing a tournament, the players would come out in a huff to explain exactly why cities with 23% unemployment are angry, confused and racist, and what we can do to stop it happening again.

This did not happen here. The currents must never cross. And this applies to all of us, not just the extreme health risks of BBC chauvinism. Look away from the uncomfortable contradiction. Instead, let us present gold for Sprockington in the horse-drawn tricycle jumps. Cakebread wins bronze in the 40-foot spangle-thrust. Don’t adjust your reality. Because we are Team GB. And this is Managed Victory.

This is nothing new, of course. The London 2012 Games set an elite benchmark for the gap between show and reality, the idea of ​​sport as a useful distraction and a generator of political capital. Not least with its extraordinary magnesium flare of an opening ceremony. Tonight we bring you Britain, in this case Gary Barlow singing Let It Be in a giant pork pie, Roger Moore breakdancing to Elgar on top of the Tardis and 40,000 nurses Charlestoning to a drum and bass version of the Coronation Street theme tune. Cheer from your sofa. Feel lifted by the success of others. Because that’s pretty much what you’re going to get in the way of “legacy”.

There is a more developed side to all this now. In Paris it felt as if the simultaneous occurrence of riots at home and the constantly praised Team GB medal chase were actually trying to tell us something.

Because the reality is that these two worlds are not separate. One explains the other. Elite performance, elite funding. Let those tennis courts crack. Close the youth clubs. Leave the changing rooms to knotweed. How to run a sport. How to run a country. It turns out that these are two sides of the same place.

It is interesting to consider in this light what Team GB actually is. It is not a government body or a charity. It is the public end of a private company, whose highest-paid director earns £483,263 according to the latest accounts, which is remotely licensed and controlled by the government to fulfil its national Olympic role, use flags and anthems, and run and monetise these sports pretty much as it sees fit.

The change to Team GB came in the mid-1990s, masterminded by Marzena Bogdanowicz, the BOA’s then Marketing Director, who decided that “we weren’t strong enough as a brand”. That process was accelerated by public dismay at winning just one gold medal at Atlanta 1996. It was a poor return. But it was also authentic, an honest reflection of the state of grassroots sporting facilities, access and elite coaching.

The response was not to tackle that culture head-on. Instead, it was the classic ‘get-in-the-consultants’ thing. The High Performance regime was devised. This involves adopting a results-based approach in which medal counts are the primary measure of value, focusing resources on the most talented in sports where success is achievable, and watering the flower petals rather than the grassroots, which will always be easier and more immediately visible.

In fact, we have outsourced national top-level sport.

Three decades later, Team GB is so successful an entity, so thoroughly catapulted into the popular British summer consciousness, a kind of quadrennial royal wedding party, that you can consume the entire Olympics through its lens. Team GB has 34 official partners (it reportedly has more global partners than GB itself). Team GB can sell you a complete range of branded products for life, from underwear to tableware to endless, endless, so, so many flags.

Medals are the key here. Medals are public money, goodwill, merchandise, the maintenance of the illusion that this success represents something other than itself. This is the fundamental contradiction in a national high-performance culture.

There are gold medals stored. But these gold medals are the work of those who were involved in winning them. Victory without context means nothing in the broader sense. The only social value in a medal is where it expresses a physical culture, is the ultimate proof of a system at work, of public access, of fertilizing the soil, of encouraging participation, of seeing what grows.

Without these real advantages, that piece of gold is in effect a cheat code, a shortcut to the podium. And in that sense at least Team GB really does represent GB, just not in the way it thinks. Funding for the few, a scramble for resources elsewhere. Sound familiar?

The huge rise in Team GB’s success at the Olympic level corresponds directly with a simultaneous sell-out of playing fields, the slashing of school sports funding, the well-documented neglect of public facilities, the loss of public space in cities. That is how the GB in Team GB is organised. Recruit your athletes, and indeed your prime ministers, from the best private schools. Opportunities for some. Elite performances for the elite. Haves and have-nots. These worlds are not just related. They are the same.

Once again this process seems to have been accelerated and generally best summed up by the great theatre of the Team GB Games, London 2012. They were sold to the public on the basis of legacy, which is always just a sales pitch. Not just infrastructure projects that were already underway, but also the assumption that there is a link between staging a two-week super event and members of the public having a sustained participation in sport, that TV images of someone waving a medal is the key missing element, more than actual investment and care.

In the meantime, it would take a 10,000-word treatise to capture the dramatic irony, the beautiful, doomed scenes of the opening ceremony, a fever dream of dancing beefeaters, Vladimir Putin watching the Jam get out of a taxi, John Betjeman trashing the Blue Peter garden, and Paddington Bear leading a riot in Kent.

Worst of all, London gave us Boris Johnson as the Downing Street-bound big-projects man, all empty boasting and grand British talk. It gave us David Cameron unwittingly predicting his own failure. In the programme Cameron quotes Tennyson’s Ulysses, “To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield”, apparently unaware that this is a poem about a spoiled king who eventually abandons the hated proletariat midway through his reign to pursue his own pleasure, which precisely predicts his own premiership, in which he surrenders to the safety of his shed.

None of this should detract from the achievements of individual athletes, the beauty of competition and the expression of talent. No one should be denied these high-performance benefits. But the Team GB project gives us an unintended lens, a working example in the summer of riots at home and medals abroad, a space where Britain and Team GB intersect. Managed decline? Say hello to Managing Victory.

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