European Championships: the Hyperbole of Tourism and Events

Well, that was a week of fun despite the sacrifice made by Glaswegans to accommodate and fund the European Championships. Glasgow along with Berlin had hosted the European Championships with swimming, cycling and gymnastics in Glasgow and athletics in Berlin. I was living in Glasgow and had gone along to buy tickets but the cycling in the velodrome that I wanted to see was sold out. I watched the women's and men's road races by switching between Kelvigrove Park and Gibson Street for the descents that were too fast for some of the following cars that were scraping their rear ends on the change of gradients. There were  9 and 16 laps of a 14-kilometre circuit around the city centre for the women's and men's racesrespectively. 

I also managed a morning run alongside the women's time trial on a very wet Wednesday. City traffic was disrupted for three days and we couldn't watch the events on television because the communal TV aerial for the flat was broken and the repair company could not access the road because of the road closures. We had no broadband because a fire at a nightclub next to the telephone exchange has resulted in the Open Reach engineers being unable to access the exchange. It is symbolic of the state of the infrastructure in Glasgow: worn out and in dire need of upgrading like many of the services. Austerity, outsourcing and poor maintenance regimes are unpopular Glasgow vices with its residents. 

The road races passed along Woodlands Road at the end of our road and made a tough circuit around Park Circus. We had limited access to the flat because the roads were closed for two weeks for the road for the cycle race to be resurfaced. We'll have to wait for the next big event for any further repairs and the pavements, well! All the litter bins along the route were emptied several times a day during the event as opposed to rarely and only when overflowing onto the street. The pavements were swept more times in the week than the rest of the year and hundreds of marshalls were employed to secure the route. Road sweepers ran throughout the night before the races to clean the roads but there were still more punctures, according to the commentator, Chris Boardman, than ever seen before in a cycle race 

According to the organisers, the event was a huge success with over 500,000 spectators.  This included the best estimate of 140,000 people  lining the streets watching outdoor events, the rest were the paying spectators at the main venues. The total cost of the games cost the City Council and Scottish Government £90m. Meanwhile, libraries, pitches and sports facilities have been closed, The cost of using sports facilities has risen and many services have been vastly reduced. Sport it seems is for the elite not for all, making mockery of the strapline. Glasgow likes to complain about how it is not treated fairly in terms of resources and certainly it has lost out to Edinburgh since the arrival of the Scottish Parliament.. However, its obsessive desire to showcase major events could be argued as equally regressive for local residents as the way that the UK and Scottish governments treat their taxpayers.