BORIS JOHNSON: Ignore the gloomsters, the Olympics can be a triumph

Oh listen to the cackling, the joy, the sheer slavering glee. For week after week the world’s media has been churning negativity about the Paris Olympics.

There are bedbugs all over the hotels, we are told, giant mutant bedbugs with titanium jaws.

The meat in the athletes’ canteen is, allegedly, raw.

The River Seine is the official venue for some of the swimming events, and yet it is full of sewage.

A crazed Russian chef has been arrested for apparently plotting to do something even more terrible to the catering service. And yesterday – only hours before the opening ceremony – a gang of arsonists attacked the rail network in a total cauchemar for the travelling public.

I have no doubt that there are plenty of French citizens who are willing to curse President Emmanuel Macron for having the hubris to allow the world’s greatest sporting event to engulf their beautiful capital.

Why, they will be asking, are we spending so many billions of euros, just so a few people in singlets can scamper round an athletics track?

Why are we disrupting the lives of Parisians? Why are we risking a terrorist attack? Pourquoi oh pourquoi? say the French columnists.

Well, maybe it’s because I love Paris, or because my grandmother was French; or maybe it’s because I have some experience of the psychological helter-skelter of running an Olympic city, but I utterly refuse to join in the chorus of gloom.

I say to Emmanuel, and to the mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo – relax! Keep calm, and tout va se terminer par s’arranger.

I have no doubt that the Paris Olympics will be a triumph – and here’s why.

I remember exactly the same sort of conniptions in the run-up to the London Olympics in 2012 when I was mayor.

Like every Olympic city, we had to put in Soviet-style Zil lanes on the roads – special routes to allow the gerontocrats of the Olympic committee to be ferried, in their limos, from one venue to the next.

The people of London were outraged.

In fact, they complained about virtually every aspect of the expense and dislocation, ever more bitterly, until the final week before curtain up when we discovered that we were missing thousands – I mean thousands – of security guards.

These men and women had ticked a box informing the poor contractor they were interested in protecting the Olympic and Paralympic Games, and then they had found other work, as bouncers or short-order chefs, or whatever, and they just vanished.

It was ghastly. We had to mobilise the Army to help. We managed to drive the American team half way to Southend, after their coach driver got lost.

One of the bridges on the M4 – a vital part of the ‘Olympic Route Network’ – was found to have disintegrating concrete stanchions, about as robust, I was told, as a freshly dunked Hobnob.

Even after the opening ceremony – which took place, people now forget, in a pretty decided Scotch mist – the chaos and cock-ups continued. We managed to play the wrong anthem at a medal ceremony. We had at least two bomb hoaxes.

We were struggling to fill all of the venues, because some people with complimentary tickets were failing to turn up and people were starting to complain about pictures of empty seats. Above all, Team GB wasn’t winning any medals, or not as many as we had hoped.

Then it all began to change.

After two or three days of shredded nerves, the mood of the public began to lift, and after a long period in which nothing seemed to go right, it suddenly felt as if nothing could go wrong. We started to win medals, gold after gold after gold; and it was if someone had put serotonin in the water supply.

People started talking to each other on the Tube, and gathering in huge crowds to watch, and what had seemed to be a frost* became a runaway success. Ask anyone who was there in London 2012, and they will remember that feeling during those long, sunny days of the nation seeming to come together as never before in our lives.

What was it about? Well, it was pride, partly, at feeling that the eyes of the world were on us, and that we were putting on a good show. But it was also the show itself – the sport.

As we watched the drama of the competition, people who had never cared much for athletics, or any of the other sports, became engrossed. We were watching human beings in the absolute extremity of passion and ambition and exertion, and we were feeling the agony of their disappointment, and the elation of their success.

Now, we are going to see that spectacle again, and I confidently predict that it will move us, and fascinate us – and it will be good for us all.

Whatever else you say about the Olympic and Paralympic Games, they represent a blatantly conservative ideological proposition.

I am afraid that we in Britain are still going through a post-Covid patch of sogginess and inertia. What with furlough, and then the cost-of-living payments – essential though those were at the time – we have somehow got used to the idea that the State can fix everything, and pay for everything.

Just when we should be trying to reduce the cost of the State, and cutting taxes, we have elected a Labour government that is determined to whack up our taxes even further – pre-empting private investment and choking growth; the last thing the economy needs.

We have a Labour government that wants to impose more regulation on our labour markets, to attack private enterprise, private healthcare, private education and, above all, to penalise aspiration and achievement.

The Olympic Games have exactly the opposite ethos, and I hope that they send exactly the opposite message to young people in this country.

That is because the lesson from those Olympic and Paralympic athletes is that in the end government funding and training is not enough. In the furnace of world-class competition, it is not even enough to have world-class talent.

You need something extra. You need an absolute determination to win, and to practise and practise, until you are good enough to win. You need to overcome your own pain barriers, your own apathy, and you need to rise on the stepping stones of your exhausted self to the podium of the victors.

These Games are a vast and protracted lesson in the importance of individual effort and achievement – and a vivid reminder that these virtues must come from within.

At a moment when I worry a lot about the working-from-home I’ll-get-back-to-you not-me-guv manana culture into which we seem to be sinking, and which Labour is actually encouraging, the Olympics remind us of an eternal truth. If we want to succeed in our lives, then there will be moments when we need sheer grit.

What is true of these athletes is true of every person in the world. That is why we watch the Games with such interest; and that is their message to humanity.

That’s why I am sure the Paris Games will be terrific, and a credit to France – and bonne chance to Team GB!

Literary Corner

*Frost: A failure (‘My prime of youth is but a frost of cares’: opening line of Elegy by Chidiock Tichborne who wrote it while awaiting execution for his part in the Babington Conspiracy to assassinate Elizabeth I and replace her with the Catholic Mary Queen of Scots.)