2. Scotch the Big Lie.

The Big Lie in this case is that a healthy sporting structure is represented by Olympic success. It is pretty obviously a Big Lie. Consider the positions of two countries in the 2008 Olympic medal table:

Gold Silver Bronze Position

China
51 21 28 1st

Argentina
2 0 4 34th

Yet Argentina is one of the world's great sporting nations, up there at the top in football, golf, tennis, rugby, motor racing and polo, the home of such legends as Di Stéfano, Maradona, Fangio and de Vicenzo. China is not a sporting nation at all (I have travelled in both) with no tradition or grass roots in sport and a Confucian culture which has encouraged contempt for physical prowess. A young man of ordinary talents in China cannot even find himself an organised game of football or a place to play. All they have is a Soviet-style policy to recruit specialist athletes from childhood and to "target" Olympic medals, largely in sports hardly anybody normally watches, let alone plays.

One aspect of the Big Lie concerns the relationship between the grass roots and the elite in sport: it says that national elite success encourages participation. Sports ministers, who, with the honourable exceptions of Kate Hoey and Dennis Howell, have normally known less about sport than the average club barman, are wont to recall that when they were young the tennis racket came out of the cupboard during Wimbledon and that we all rushed out to play football in the May sunshine once the Cup Final was over. Well yes, but bear in mind that in the decade surrounding England's victory in the Rugby World Cup in 2003 participation in the game by adults plummeted by over 50 per cent, that the 2005 Ashes victory had no perceptible impact on participation in cricket and that there are lots of sports which thrive either without any elite role models or in complete ignorance of them: for example, most equestrian and winter sports, fishing, skittles, fell-running - the list is long. At best, chauvinist inspiration is a marginal and double-edged factor in sporting participation, but to listen to those in authority you would think it was the crucial determinant. This is the usual effect of low-level statecraft. Olympic and similar successes give governments objectives they can achieve and boast about (which genuine professional sport doesn't) and, naturally, they tend to exaggerate the significance of those achievements.