Give me the $866 million Olympic sponsorship. I know how to spend it

The money spent on the Games is colossal. Better to spend it on something useful, not the antics of athletes

Alice Miles

Were you up for Rebecca? Did you catch that split-second moment when her hand touched the edge of the pool first? Or did you perhaps read about her Jimmy Choos yesterday; the promise from her mum of a new pair of Christian Louboutin heels if she won?

I am not sure whether the dull details of the Olympic gold medal-winner's training regime (“in the run-up to the Games, she was training from 6am to 8am, swimming about 7,000-8,000m per two-hour session”) or the slavering over her love of designer shoes (“I want one pair for every outfit”) is more mind-numbing. Or perhaps the striking moment when the young diver Tom Daley looked “askance” at his diving partner who was talking on the phone!

These people: they jump in a pool, they swim, sometimes they dive, or they do both. Good on 'em, if it's what they want to do: even I can see the achievement in being the fastest in the world, if that is your ambition. But must we all join in the pretence that the shenanigans in Beijing are important in any way for the rest of the country; that the Games tell us anything of any consequence about humanity, about ourselves, about our nation? We invest all this effort, all this faux national pride, the pages of blather, the air miles, the travelling dignitaries, the full panoply of pomp - and in the end, all that's happened is somebody has managed to swim fast. Or run. Or jump. Perhaps all three.

I feel sorry for some of the athletes: identified as potential champions as children, their remaining childhood and youth is stolen from them by gruelling training regimes and rounds of international competitions.

I once interviewed Sebastian Coe and was struck by his description of a childhood spending all the hours outside school plodding up and down the Pennines, and his teenage years “trudging around tracks on the northern circuit when my friends were backpacking around Europe”. It doesn't sound like a lot of fun being an athlete - and think of all the ones not in Beijing, those who have fallen by the wayside en route. You can often see the parents of the high-achievers hovering in the background, eyes fixed on their offspring, faces shining with ambition for them. I wonder: would a child push him or herself so hard without that pressure?

If they do get to the Olympics itself, one bloated marketing festival awaits them. A dozen firms, including Coca-Cola, Samsung, Kodak, General Electric, Johnson & Johnson and McDonald's have paid a total of $866 million to be official sponsors of the Beijing Games, and have demanded exclusivity. So since mid-July, the Chinese authorities, via the organising committee for the Games, have grabbed control of all prominent advertising sites in the capital and at transport hubs, and limited their use to official sponsors only.

Broadcasters must avoid showing close-ups of any spectators enjoying unofficial food or drinks, or wearing clothing displaying the wrong brand. From the spectators corralled in to fill empty seats for the television cameras, to the little girl whose voice opened the Olympics but whose face was replaced by a cuter one, the entire spectacle is a triumph of manipulation. Imagine being that seven-year-old girl watching a prettier, “flawless” child mime the words to your song, to international applause. It is the very opposite of sporting.

I was idly mulling over these things, with curiosity and mild irritation, as I opened my mail and came across a letter about some parking tickets. The letter from Samantha of the parking company was irritating in many ways, as these things tend to be (stick with me, it is the same column), but what shot straight into my brain and continues to buzz inside it today like an annoying wasp was this: “As you received two charges notices you should of queried the first one.”

I should of, should I? There has been a fair amount of correspondence on the Times letters page recently about proper spelling, after some academic from something calling itself a university suggested allowing students to get away with “variant” spelling, or what you and I would call “misspelling”, of words such as “ignor”, “opertunity” and “speach”. He was joined by the Spelling Society, champions of bad spelling, who argue that all “ee” sounds - team, quay, people, sardine - should be spelt with “ee”.

So I cheered (cheared?) to read yesterday of the small explosion by a judge at the Old Bailey who branded an official from the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) an “illiterate idiot” for making grammatical errors and spelling mistakes on a charge sheet. The defendant had been charged with causing “greivous bodily harm”, and using a weapon, “namely axe”, which should have read “namely an axe”. “It's quite disgraceful,” fumed the judge, David Paget. “This is supposed to be a centre of excellence. To have an indictment drawn up by some illiterate idiot is not good enough.”

Quite. It's not. Give me $866 million to throw at literacy, any day. Or give me, in fact, £9.3 billion, the amount Britain is gearing up to squander on its own Olympics shindig. That is just about the annual budget of the entire Home Office - let us use it to teach CPS officials to spell instead.

Let us take the £10 billion being squandered on London 2012, cancel the grandiose stadiums, turn away the marketing men and employ 50,000 “superheads” to show Samantha how to differentiate between a preposition and a verb. Let us spend that money on every child who spells speech as speach; on every adult who does not know that it's it's; and on sacking each and every teacher and university lecturer who declares that it does not matter.

It does matter. Much more than medals, more than Rebecca's training regime. Or regeem.

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