Strike a light

It is a bit late to start saying that politics should be kept out of sport after the protests surrounding the troubled journey of the Olympic torch through London, which no doubt will be repeated in Paris and almost every other country where the torch - looking like a novelty rounders bat cigarette lighter incidentally - wends its way.

It was politics that got us into this mess in the first place when the games were awarded to China by the IOC in 2001. Anyone who voted for Beijing claiming it would change China's attitude towards human rights and make it a pinnacle of democracy in the seven years leading up to the games was either a liar or fool. Much more likely reasons to influence voting were probably hidden in the murky world of business and arms deals, foreign aid and influence and plain old brown envelopes.

A pity though that the art of protest has not moved on one jot since the heyday of CND, Vietnam and miner's strikes in the 60s and 70s, all chants and placards and charging police lines for the cameras. A much more elegant and telling protest would have been for no one at all to have turned up and left the torch to make its tainted journey in empty streets with only TV cameras and police for company. That would have infuriated Beijing much more than what turned out to be a hard-line police approach which no doubt the Chinese authorities will claim is hardly any different to its own treatment of protesters in Tibet.

What is done is done though and it is too late to rectify a mistake made seven years ago. The world's athletes deserve their moment of glory after working for four years to compete, although even the Olympic ideal has been tarnished by the more and more commercialised IOC and its obsession with TV and sponsorship. Changing the rules to ban the likes of Eddie the Eagle and Eric the Eel did more damage to the Olympic movement than any amount of protests. The Olympics might be about excellence but first and foremost it should be about taking part.