The tragic mistake of previous years

On 24 August 2008, Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, who was in Beijing for the closing ceremony of the Olympic games, said this:

“We want to encourage competitive sports in schools, not the 'medals for all' culture we have seen in previous years. It was wrong because it doesn't work. In sport you get better by challenging yourself against other people...

We have started to correct what I believe was the tragic mistake of previous years of reducing the competitive element in schools sports.”

Apparently, Brown was inspired to say this by the glowing example of Shanaze Reade, the British BMX champion who ‘was not happy to settle for a silver. She went full throttle for the gold. I think that is the spirit we want to encourage in our schools.'

Reade, favourite for the gold medal in the 2008 and 2012 Olympics, won no kind of medal in either.

On 22 July 2009, eleven months after Gordon Brown’s ‘tragic mistake’ speech, double Olympic Champion, Dame Kelly Holmes, was quoted thus in The Daily Mail:

“Too often, in these politically sensitive times, it seems that competitiveness is seen as a dirty word. I was surprised by how many schools I came across where sports day had been abandoned.

It's very important to learn how to lose. What you should do is pick yourself up, dust yourself down and start all over again. If everyone gets a prize, where on earth is the incentive to push yourself to do better next time?  

Competitive sport can increase a child's confidence, develop their social skills and get them fit into the bargain.”

Common sense. A concept that the ‘politically sensitive,’ despise almost as much as the whole truth.

The Mail also told us that, in 2007:

“In 2007, Government figures showed numbers were still falling. One million fewer school children were pitted against their classmates than the previous year.

In total, 3.1million pupils aged five to 16, equal to more than four in ten school children, did not play any competitive sport, while 438 schools did not hold a sports day, a survey for the Department for Children, Schools and Families showed.

Last year the Football Association banned children under the age of eight from playing in football leagues and cups amid fears they are under too much pressure. Youngsters can still play matches but results must be kept private and no league tables can be compiled.”

The ‘medals for all’ culture introduced by stealth in the 1960s and institutionalised at a national level since then by a variety of left-wing ideologues, was a key component of socialist indoctrination in our schools from the 1980s onwards.

It still is. Despite Brown’s vote-catching Olympic rhetoric, even now, after the 2012 successes, (due primarily to privately educated Olympians outside the Comprehensive loop) our children are still being held back by this deathly PC dogma.

The ‘all must have prizes’ philosophy was satirised as long ago as 1865 when Lewis Caroll published Alice in Wonderland. In the book we are told that ‘they had been running half an hour or so,’ when the competitors were told that the race was over. ‘They all crowded round… panting, and asking, But who has won?’

This question couldn’t be answered ‘without a great deal of thought’ and the character who answered it ‘sat for a long time with one finger pressed upon its forehead.’ At last it said,

“Everybody has won and all must have prizes.”

The creature Carroll awarded this sentiment to was none other than the Dodo. 

Figure it out.