Launched in Tokyo at the "Hearing Out the Anti-Olympics Case" press conference on 23rd July 2019:
olympicswatch.org

It's a question being asked more and more about the Olympics. $20billion? Is it really worth it? For three weeks? Yeah, it's a lot! What could we get for that money? Jobs, health care, elderly care, roads, education, homeless shelters, affordable housing... NoBostonOlympics videos of Bostonians talking back about lost opportunities, lack of transparency in the bid, thumbs down to Boston2024....

Lest we forget - Dow, the company the IOC likes to do business with....

'Lawyers with the organization EarthRights International spent 15 years trying to make Dow Chemical pay to clean up the contamination of the soil and groundwater around the old factory site. In the summer of 2014, a US district court in New York ruled that the company did not have to pay for cleanup work -- on grounds that the project manager who was in charge of plant construction and waste disposal had only been employed by the Indian subsidiary.'

London 2012 is still not inspiring people in the host borough of Newham to take up sport. A recent report from UKActive showed that the borough was home to the least active population in England. A second host Borough, Barking and Dagenham, came second in the list. UKActive also highlighted the unsurprising finding that participation was lowest in the poorest parts of the county. But not only is poverty a marker for lower rates of activity so, perhaps surprisingly, is youth. Far from inspiring sport participation among the 'target' age group of 16-25 year olds the period after the Games witnessed an actual decline in activity in this age group.

by Matthew Richmond

Protesters display a banner of Mayor Eduardo Paes and State Governor Sergio Cabral holding Rio de Janeiro’s famous Christ statue hostage. The banner below reads “Who gives the order? Who gets the progress?”

‘I think the Vitality programme is absolutely brilliant – everything I stand for is echoed in the values of Vitality.’ These are the inane words of Olympic heroine Jessica Ennis, now earning a fast buck as a ‘Vitality Ambassadress’ through which she will ‘participate in a number of marketing activities…which add value to the Vitality proposition’. Diplomatically, she continues ‘we all love to be rewarded for our hard work to get healthy…’

Obesity in the UK continues to rise. Figures from the Health and Social Care Information Centre for 2011 show there has been a marked rise in obesity rates over the past eight years, coinciding with the bid and lead up to London 2012. The HSCIC also raises the alarm about children’s body image, particularly among girls, with hospital admissions up 16% in the last year of the survey.