When London was awarded the 2012 Olympics, organizers promised an ambitious legacy: to get two million more people in England involved in sports and physical activity....
Read more …When London was awarded the 2012 Olympics, organizers promised an ambitious legacy: to get two million more people in England involved in sports and physical activity.
But with the Games in less than 18 months, that commitment now resembles a wheezing jogger, bent over and winded from a New Year’s resolution whose ambition could not be matched by exertion.
London’s original pledge evolved into a plan to get one million more people around England playing sports three or more times a week for at least 30 minutes at a time, known as the 3x30 plan. Even that target is proving elusive.
Figures issued in December by Sport England, the governing body for community sports, indicated that participation at the 3x30 level had increased by 123,000 since 2007-8, when the one million baseline was established. But that number increased by only 8,000 in the last year. At the current rate, the goal of one million new participants would not be reached in 2012-13 as hoped but more than a decade later in 2023-24.
Meanwhile, in a country that is among the fattest in Europe, the number of couch potatoes apparently continues to grow. Surveys by Sport England indicate that the number of adults doing zero moderate sports activity rose by nearly 300,000 from 2005, when London was awarded the Olympics, to the fall of 2010.
Inadequate planning, a change in government, severe funding cutbacks to sports organizations and an apparent overestimation of the impact the Olympics can have on mass participation have all forced a rethinking of England’s Olympic legacy.
**The excerpt above is taken from the NYT article, "England Finds 2012 Olympics Don't Spur Exercise," written by Jere Longman which is linked below. Do click through to read more about this public health issue.**
