I can’t say that I’m particularly interested in the bloated sportsday that’s known as the Olympics, though I did see a few bits of the opening ceremony. Danny Boyle was undoubtedly the right man to create the spectacle – after all, his most famous movie, Trainspotting, shared the same theme as the Olympics: tracksuit-clad young adults pumped full of illegal drugs.

I did stumble across a comment that Britain had won 12 gold medals to date on a blog I follow. Apparently, this was rather unexpected at this stage of the jamboree. I therefore thought it would be interesting to compare Britain’s medal count with countries of similar population sizes. The following table shows the current medal tallies for Britain and the three immediately larger and smaller countries.

So, they you have it: Britain has won significantly more medals than any other country of similar size – conclusive evidence that far too much money is being wasted on sport in the UK in the pursuit of meaningless gewgaws. What a national disgrace! And particularly so in these difficult economic times.

Whilst I rarely agree with the policies of the UK Conservative party, it is at least gratifying that they are designed to combat the harm that sport is doing to the country – policies such as selling off school playing fields to developers and closing down local sports facilities and swimming pools. In time these policies will have the positive effect of reducing wasteful expenditure on sports in the UK, and will also have the added benefit, one hopes, of putting out of work the psychopathic bullies who work in so many schools in the UK under the label “sports master”.

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