Sport and the increasing waistline.

“I firmly believe that any man's finest hour, the greatest fulfilment of all that he holds dear, is that moment when he has worked his heart out in a good cause and lies exhausted on the field of battle – victorious.”
Vince Lombardi

I thought I would start this blog with a quote. This a cliché and any book on writing will tell you so. The reason for starting with this quote is not only because I love the quote but it can define life in general. Most people would accept that nothing is free in life and everything requires a modicum of work. Also most people would agree that there is great satisfaction in achieving goals through hard work.

The point of this blog is not too talk about hard work, it is too talk about a topic loosely related to this. In the past 20 or so years sport has become big business. The reason why this has become big business is that people love to watch sport. Not only do people love to watch sport but they pay substantial subscriptions to watch sports. I know this because I am a subscriber. Nearly every pub or bar you pass has some kind of live sporting event on. Television because it gets punters through the doors. So sport is watched more than ever, so why, with all this supreme athletic achievement in front of us all the time are we fatter than ever? We watch more sport than ever but we participate less than ever.

This is a serious there is a ticking time bomb of obesity in developed nations. Health care systems could crumble under the weight literally of obesity related diseases such as diabetes, heart disease and depression.

Most people participate in sports through school but very few continue past the age of sixteen. Why is that the people who watch sports are not inspired to participate?. Has the sports man become so distant from the average man in the street that people do not want to be like them?

I think that there is a confluence of factors that have led to this problem. People hated playing sports at school as was not cool. Secondly the local clubs closed as people got distracted by other things on the weekend. Mainly shopping. Thirdly the arrival of the computer generation led to the idea that playing sports for leisure was dull when you have a play station. Finally the gym industry if ever there was a way of making sport appear dull and not fun turn it into a business.

All these issues have to be fixed to some degree or other but something has to be done to otherwise we literally collapse under the weight of our own greed.