You are a person. As a person you will be aware of the things that have been going on around you over the last couple of months. One of those things was the Olympics and another of those things was the Paralympics, which are still going on right now.
One of the big selling points of the Games (you have to capitalise the 'G' like you do with God) was the legacy they would leave behind after all the events were over. People would watch all of the sport that was being forced into their eyes by the big, shiny boxes in front of them and be inspired to do something similar. They would think, 'Yeah, Jessica Ennis is hot. I want to be as hot as her so I will stop doing all these drugs, abandon the five children I had when I was 8 and become a heptathlete. God save the Queen.'
Disabled people would think more along the lines of, 'Yeah, that guy with no arms (the name of which no-one will remember as soon as they turn over the TV) has really inspired me. It's about time I joined the army, got involved in a near fatal explosion and then turned to sport as a way of using up all that extra testosterone I'll have pumping through my veins that before I would have used when blowing up hundreds of innocent Iraqi civilians. God save the Queen, or I'll batter him.'
That is what Seb Coe had in his mind when he was planning all of this. That is the message he sold to the press and the public as a way of making them think the whole thing wasn't a massive waste of money and that the enormous debt we would be plunged into because of it would be worth it in the long run.
But something Lord C forgot about was the fact that we are, unfortunately, British. We are not the British of old who would swan off to foreign lands, kill all the natives and claim their country for our own. We are not the British who once owned over half of the world. We are not the British who defeated the Germans in the name of freedom (twice) and we are not the British who could once boast that within its isles was the greatest cricket team on Earth. Those times have gone, taking with them Andrew Strauss and slavery, one of which is probably a good thing.
Now, instead of all that, we are the British who are overweight, on benefits, lazy and slow. We are the British who have grandchildren by the time we are 27 and have had more than ten sexual partners before our first ever sex ed class. We spend all of our spare time (of which we have lots due to having no jobs) drinking and getting into fights, often over the sports that are meant to encourage us to stop doing just that.
No legacy will change that. No legacy will stop us being casually racist, a little bit homophobic and a few doses more bitter than any part of this blog post could ever hope to live up to.
It might make us think about getting active and it might make us aspire to become better people, but at the end of the day achieving any of that sounds much too much like hard work and why the hell would we want to do anything like that?
We could just get paid for sitting on our backsides all day watching Bargain Hunt.
Deal.
