Managing Victory while the world burns. The British Olympic Association has an impressively large selection of mottoes and taglines at its disposal. Even its main competition handle, “Team GB”, is basically a cool slogan, a mid-90s rebrand of UK plc’s Summer Sport division.
Beyond this we have a full roster, many already safely trademarked: Believe in Extraordinary. Pride the Lion. The Lion Awakens. Patriotic Lion Alternatives For A Brighter British Tomorrow. On closer inspection the last couple of these may in fact be taglines for the current spume of British nationalist movements which, in an unfortunate coincidence, tend to have the same kind of vibe, vocab and big cat imagery.
But it isn’t hard to see how some of these slogans could get a little mixed up in practice. For members of the British press at these Olympics, Managing Victory has been the key Team GB buzz phrase, the subject line of regular daily emails giving Team GB details of the latest Team GB results. Over the past week, however, those Managing Victory emails have tended to pop up sandwiched between quite a lot of other GB-related inbox content.
More Riots Planned As Three Jailed For Violent Disorder was one typical subject line beneath a Managing Victory note about yet more Team GB medal success on the bike track. Inside The Far Right As Riots Wreak Havoc Across UK made an interesting counterpoint to some breathless Managing Victory news about Team GB’s mixed triathlon gold medalists.
And by now the Managing Victory stuff has become just another small note in the sense of two entirely separate worlds in motion. On the one hand we have the Team GB-verse, an orderly, slick, functional place where healthy smiling people display British pluck and British unity, where the vibe is podium-waving, medal-chewing, national lottery-thanking, the full cloudless iconography of elite performance success.
On the other hand we have what we must, for want of a better term, call the Real World: actual Britain, which appears to not be a Team at all, to be instead divided, fearful and basically falling apart.
This has been the experience of covering these Games from inside the Paris 2024 bubble. There is a basic cognitive dissonance in breezing around the forcibly pacified streets of the most luminous city in the world, rushing from dome to stade to parc, blinded by sunlight, drunk on $10bn of expertly staged sporting spectacle.
Meanwhile the phone in your pocket keeps pinging with the latest horror from back home. Four hundred arrested. A community centre burnt down. People are throwing rocks at mosques. Australia, Nigeria, Malaysia and Indonesia have warned their citizens not to visit the UK as, frankly, it’s all kicking off. Hmm. Medal alert from the kite sailing you say?
Even odder, there seems to be an unspoken agreement that these two discrete planes of existence must never be mentioned in the same space. As they certainly would if, say, the England football team were playing a tournament, the players wheeled out balefully to explain exactly why towns with a 23% unemployment rate are angry, confused and racist, and what we can do to stop this happening again.
This has not happened here. The streams must never cross. And this applies to all of us, not only the extreme health-risk levels of jingoism on the BBC sofa. Look away from the uneasy juxtaposition. Allow us to present instead gold for Sprockington on the horse drawn tricycle jumps. Cakebread takes bronze in the 40-foot spangle-thrust. Do not adjust your reality. For we are Team GB. And this is Managed Victory.
This is of course nothing new. The London 2012 Games set an elite performance standard for the divide between show and reality, the notion of sport as a useful distraction and generator of political capital. Not least with its extraordinary magnesium flare of an opening ceremony. Tonight we bring you Britain, which is in this case Gary Barlow singing Let It Be inside a giant pork pie, Roger Moore breakdancing to Elgar on top of the Tardis and 40,000 nurses Charlestoning to a drum’n’bass version of the Coronation Street theme tune. Cheer from your sofas. Feel uplifted by the success of others. Because this is pretty much what you’re going to get in the way of “legacy”.
There is a more developed side to this now. In Paris it has felt as though the simultaneous occurrence of riots back home and constantly fanfared Team GB medal pursuit actually is trying to tell us something.
Because the reality is these two worlds are not separate. One explains the other. Elite performance, elite funding. Let those tennis courts crack. Close the youth clubs. Abandon the changing rooms to knotweed. How to run a sport. How to run a country. It turns out that these are two sides of the same place.
It is interesting in this light to remember what Team GB actually is. This is not a government agency or a charity. It is the public end of a private company whose highest paid director is on £483,263 according to the latest accounts, which is licensed and monitored at arm’s-length by the government to fulfil its national Olympic body role, to use flags and anthem, and to run and monetise these sports pretty much as it sees fit.
The change to Team GB took place in the mid-1990s, as conceived by Marzena Bogdanowicz, the BOA’s then director of marketing, who decided that “we weren’t strong enough as a brand”. That process was sped along by general dismay at winning only one gold medal at Atlanta 1996. This was a poor return. But it was also authentic, an honest reflection of the state of grassroots sport facilities, access and elite coaching.
The response was not to address that culture head-on. Instead it was classic get-the-consultants-in stuff. The High-Performance regime was conceived. This involves taking an outcome-based approach whereby medal count is the key measure of worth, resources are applied to the most talented in sports where success is actionable, watering the petals not the grassroots, which is always going to be easier and more instantly visible.
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Basically, we outsourced elite national sport.
Three decades on Team GB has been so successful as an entity, so throughly catapulted into the folksy British summer consciousness, a kind of four-yearly royal wedding party, that you can consume the entire Olympic Games through its lens. Team GB has 34 official partners (arguably it has more worldwide partners than actual GB). Team GB can sell you a complete array of branded life products, from underpants to crockery to endless, endless, just so, so much bunting.
Medals are key to this. Medals are public money, goodwill, merch, the maintaining of the illusion that this success represents something other than simply itself. This is the basic contradiction in a national high-performance culture.
Gold medals have been stockpiled. But these golds are the work of those involved in winning them. Victory without context means nothing more broadly. The only societal value in a medal is where it expresses a physical culture, is the final evidence of a working system, of public access, fertilising the soil, encouraging participation, seeing what grows.
When these real world benefits are absent that chunk of gold is essentially a cheat code, a short cut to the podium. And in this sense Team GB does at least represent actual GB, only not in the way it thinks. Funding for the few, a fight for resources elsewhere. Does this sound familiar?
The massive uplift in Team GB Olympic success corresponds directly with a simultaneous selling-off of playing fields, the lancing of school sport funding, the well-documented neglect of open public facilities, loss of open space in cities. This is how the GB in Team GB is also arranged. Recruit your athletes, and indeed your prime ministers, from the best private schools. Opportunities for some. Elite performance for the elite. Having and not having. These worlds are not only related. They are the same thing.
Again this process seems to have been accelerated and generally encapsulated best by the amazing theatre of the Team GB Games, London 2012. They were sold to the public on the basis of legacy, which is only ever a sales pitch. Not only infrastructure projects that were already happening, but the assumption that there is a link between staging a two-week super-event and members of the public taking a sustained part in sport, that TV pictures of someone waving a medal is the key missing element, more than actual investment and care.
In the meantime a 10,000-word dissertation is required to capture the dramatic ironies, the beautiful doomed tableaux of that opening ceremony, a fever dream of dancing beefeaters, Vladimir Putin watching the Jam get out of a taxi, John Betjeman vandalising the Blue Peter garden, Paddington Bear leading a riot in Kent.
Worst of all London gave us Boris Johnson as Downing Street-bound large projects man, all empty boosterism and big Britain chat. It gave us David Cameron unknowingly predicting his own failure. In the programme Cameron quotes Tennyson’s Ulysses, “To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield”, apparently unaware this is a poem about an entitled king who ends up abandoning the hated proles mid-reign to pursue his own amusements, prefiguring precisely his own prime ministerial reign yielding to the safety of his shed.
None of this can detract from what the individual athletes achieve, from the beauty of competition and expression of talent. Nobody should be denied these high-performance benefits. But the Team GB project gives us an inadvertent lens, a working example in the summer of riots at home and medals abroad, a space where Britain and Team GB intersect. Managed decline? Meet Managing Victory.
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