The Olympic Handover Sham

The soon to occur Olympic handover from Beijing to London sounds like it was made up by a bunch of idiots with little Olympic knowledge. It'll be led by David Beckham, who last I checked was a footballer. He will be kicking footballs to children representing each Olympic nation. Hurrah, I hear you say... at least it's got something to do with sports. Yeah... just not one the British participate in!

Due to much legal wrangling over professional sportsmen, FIFA recognition and some nationalistic tomfoolery there is no Team GB football team for the Olympic games. We don't play football at the Olympics!! Isn't it a tad insulting to the many gold winning British Olympians to have some guy who doesn't represent a British Olympic sport opening the games just because he's famous?

Then we have the actual order of events:

After entering the Bird’s Nest stadium atop a London bus, he will kick a football around with children representing the 205 Olympic nations. Lewis, the X Factorwinner, and Page, lead guitarist with Led Zeppelin, are also scheduled to perform. Hundreds of ballet dancers from the Royal Opera House accompanied by an urban dance act and a disabled dance troupe will perform routines before Mr Johnson receives the Olympic flag from his Beijing counterpart.

Does that not sound like the most uninspiring event ever, possible made up by some boring bureaucrat without any sense of occasion? I'm going to reserve further judgement until the event but I don't hold out much hope. The Chinese took the Olympics to a whole new level of cheesiness. I suspect any hope that Britain would add some much needed class to the event is misplaced.

Team GB have performed so amazingly well and it's the least we can do to respect their achievements by holding a dignified and classy Olympics. HA! I suspect by 2012 it'll be Team Eng-er-land and all the glory of Team GB will have been wasted.