I''ll have one from Group A and one from Group B

I have a theory.  After the end of the second world war, and more so after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, it became clear that in the more prosperous half of the world, there were going to be few career prospects for the aspiring autocrat.  Whereas many states still had capital punishment in the first half of the twentieth century, the practice was clearly on the way out, and there was clearly a trend where an educated middle class would resist the more oppressive measures from their political masters.

So what was the aspirng Robespierre, Pol Pot or Stalin do?  Quite obviously they all went into sports administration. You get the same sense of power fuelled by proto-Nationalist fervour without the messy genocide. Plus as Joao Havelange has demonstrated there are great opportunities for personal enrichment, largely outside the contraints of national laws.

Bernie Ecclestone once said “No driver, no person, will ever be bigger than Formula One itself.”, but as he could have pointed it out, by making the sport as big as possible and bigger than it needs to, they massage their own egos.  How much money do you really need to spend on a glorified school Sports Day? At £9 billion for competitions featuring 10,000 athletes, that works out at £900,000 per competitor, a lot for Usain Bolt to put in an appearance, let alone those athletes, no disrespect, we had never heard about from Kiribati and Guam.

Which is why we will be having apparatchiks-only lanes across the streets of London later this month (I may go for a bike ride).  Or for to further antagonise the little people while pampering the unelected few, there are legal restrictions on the use of references to the Olympics

Use of two words in Group A, or one word in Group A and one in Group B, could see you falling foul of Olympics sponsorship rules:

Group A

• Games
• Two Thousand and Twelve
• 2012
• Twenty-Twelve

Group B

• London
• Medals
• Sponsors
• Summer
• Gold
• Silver
• Bronze

I greatly resent this, which is supposedly done to protect the interests of sponsors who have paid for the privilege of having their names plastered all over the proceedings.

Unfortunately there will be no banners bearing the names of the biggest sponsor: the UK Tax Payer.