VICE launches alternative Guide To The Olympics
Pensioner Denis Clayton, who has been at every Olympics since 1960, was unable to get a ticket for London 2012. Photograph: Vice.com
Global youth media company VICE has released a new documentary that offers a trenchant critique of the London 2012 Games.
The VICE Guide to the Olympics, produced by Pegah Farahmand, tells the stories of ordinary people and explores their experience of the huge event that has come to dominate our lives in recent weeks.
Originally envisaged as an investigation into the pollution caused by the Games, the project gradually evolved into something much bigger.
The film includes a wide range of voices, from fans of the Games such as Tom Clare, who has Morris danced almost all the way from Olympia in Greece to London in honour of the event, to a self-professed member of the criminal underworld who claims he will be able to make £1,000 a day from theft during the six weeks of sport.
The interviews show how locals feel about the regeneration that was meant to accompany the Games, and it is clear that there is a prevailing sense of exclusion in the area.
“It’s as if we don’t exist”, says Stratford resident Dolores John-Phillip, who believes that those developing the area “don’t want us here”.
Worse still, many local residents see the redevelopment of east London as a means of forcing them to move out of the area and make way for more affluent people.
We also see how the sporting event has led to a suspension of civil liberties. Not only has the residential area surrounding the Olympic Park become heavily fortified in the run-up to the Games, but many voices have also been silenced, from protesters to graffiti artists.
Though addressing many serious subjects, such as the radioactive material discovered at the Olympic site in Stratford and the militarisation of east London, the film also contains a number of lighter moments.
Perhaps one of the best interviews is that with “fastidious aesthete” Stephen Bayley, former Chief Executive of the Design Museum and (briefly) creative director of the Millennium Dome project. Bayley’s principal object of wrath is the official branded items on sale during the Games, describing mascots Wenlock and Mandeville as “distorted, debased smurfs”.