http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2-2258137,00.html
By Owen Slot
The Prime Minister confesses that he never thought the country would win fight to host the Games
TONY
BLAIR has told The Times that he supports the formation of a
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A year after the success of the city’s 2012 Olympic
bid, the Prime Minister said that it would be fitting to field a British team
for the first time in 56 years. “You have to get all the federations to
agree,” Mr
Blair said. “I
think it would be a good idea. When you are hosting the Olympics and you have
lots of countries who send their teams, it would be a shame if we didn’t have one of
our own.”
Of the four British football federations,
England and Northern Ireland have given their backing to a united team, but
Wales and Scotland have not.
Mr Blair described the intensive lobbying
that took place in Singapore to secure the Games. But he admitted that he had
not believed Britain could win, and, on one occasion, confusing athletes after
his briefing cards became mixed up. “The really odd thing was that I went to
Singapore really not believing that we would win. I thought maybe we had a good
chance, but I kind of believed a lot of the pre-publicity that it was unlikely
that anyone other than Paris would win it.”
During meetings with the International Olympic
Committee members Mr Blair was handed cards with information about each of his
guests before their arrival. However, on one occasion he found himself
uncertain of who he was talking to. “It was an ice- skater who turned out to
be a javelin-thrower,” he said. “Or the other
way round. At one point the cards were getting mixed up, the wrong CVs were
coming in. I was thinking ‘this guy doesn’t look like a
javelin-thrower’. He
then said to me, ‘My main concern is about the quality of
the ice’.
And I thought ‘work
that one out, javelin-throwing must have really changed’.
Someone behind him was making frantic
gestures that suggested he wasn’t a javelin-thrower after all.”
London’s victory came
with a pledge by Lord Coe, the bid chairman, that the London Games would bring
participation and interest in Olympic sport back to young people. A year later,
there has been limited evidence of this, although Mr Blair said he hoped that
this would change.
“When I was at school, you could play
sport every day and many of us did,” he said. “It was a great
thing to be able to do. I’d like the opportunity for kids to be
able to play sport.”
In the two most recent Olympics, half of
Team GB’s
medal winners have been athletes educated at private schools. Mr Blair said
that he hoped that British medal winners could be more representative, “but it requires
us to build the facilities and encourage sport in schools. I think sport is a
major, major thing. It declined over a long period of time and we’ve got to build
it back up again.”
Examples of the reconstruction process,
he said, included “the huge investment going into
school-building and school sport in the next few years”.
The Government has set a target of four hours
of sport a week for children by 2010. Another target, about which Mr Blair is
less concerned, is reaching fourth place in the Olympic medal table — a goal set by
the British Olympic Association.
“It would be good if we could do it,” he said. “You want
to get as many medals as you can, but at the end the most important thing is
the legacy of regeneration in this part of London, which will be immense for
hundreds and thousands of people.