Olympics are a complete waste of money

Name five our Britain's Olympic gold medal winners. Tough isn't it? The grand parade through the streets of London demonstrated not how well we remember their achievements. But how quickly we have forgotten.

And there's a reason for that. The Olympians are a special breed of once-every-four-years competitors who otherwise represent no interest to the rest of us at all. Even if someone rushed into the house and told you that Chris Hoy (big Scottish bloke who won three golds) was cycling round the local park I doubt if you would be bothered to go and ask him why.

And unless you were a member of her family then the idea of marching down to the swimming pool to watch Becky Adlington (blonde lass from Mansfield) would be about as inviting as a ticket to An Evening With Anne Diamond.

Not that our lack of interest in archers, small bore rifle shooters or badminton players, makes us very different from any other nation in the world. It's just that, for some reason, we have thrown so much cash at the Olympic project in the past four years that in Beijing we actually won a lot of metalwork.

And now we can't stop. Because of one of the most inexplicably dumb decisions in modern history we now not only have to keep paying a small army of competitors to maintain their skill levels for the next four years we are going to have to cough up for bringing the whole shooting match to London.

Even when the costs was going to be a mere £9 billion this was plain bonkers. But already we can see the figures spiralling. The revelation that the Government has had to order a £95 million bail out of the Olympic village plan is being explained as an inevitable consequence of changing economic times. How often are we going to hear that in the next two or three years?

Given the collapse of private funding a £40 million leisure pool and fitness centre which was going to be one of the "legacies" of the 2012 event has already been ditched. And presumably it is desperate times which have forced the organisers to accept a monster sponsorship deal from Cadbury's. So the event that was supposed to drive our young people into a frenzy of physical activity and make them thin has now become a marketing opportunity for a company selling a product which can only make them fat.

But it's not just that the overspends, the cutbacks and the compromises have started already that makes the London Olympics such an appalling mistake.

At time when thousands of Brits are being thrown out of work and families across thee country are being forced out of our homes we are paying hundreds of people whose names we can't remember to practice sports we are not interested in order than it four years time they might have the chance of doing something totally forgettable,.