Image courtesy of link to this facebook photo

 OK I surrender let's do the mascot thing shall we. Ladies and gentlemen, meet Wenlock and Mandeville. The creatures that are to embody the spirit of the 210 Olympics and bring the ecstasy of the event to the people.

Yeah right.

Am I the only one who thinks it fitting that the mascots for the two Olympic events are faceless chinless wonders the product of overpaid sycophants of a faceless chinless government whose only failure in the profligate spending to no real purpose stakes is their failure to have that sodding mega-mosque built next door to the area of London they have taken over to build this edifice to wastrel extravagance.

I won't bother putting the links up here but if you want to look, Google is your friend and will quickly find you pages and pages of public comment on these "creations". The Daily Telegraph site was a good one, its reader comments were giving the moderators a hell of a time trying to fight back ALL sorts of stuff ranging from the overt ZION logo on Orange Freak Wenlock to a link to a Daily Mail Article that translates the colour of the "friendship bangle" worn by the Paralympic Mascot to mean he/she/it is "into anal sex". Or was it Oral Sex. No I can't remember now go look it up for yourself.

The public have not been kind to Seb Coe over these ridiculous creatures and frankly it is not hard to see why. How fitting for the surveillance society that the cyclops "eye" in the funny shaped "head" these creatures have is actually a CCTV camera capturing the public reaction to them. 

There are already a number of unkind references in cyberspace to the resemblance of these creations to various body parts. I'm not sure any are really apt although I can't help feeling I have seen those heads in a medical textbook somewhere. Or maybe it was the storyboard  for "Alien Autopsy"

But I DO have one serious question here. There are TWO mascots. One for the "Olympic Games" and another quite separate one for the "Paralympic" Games.

WHY FFS

When my kids were little, every Sunday we used to go to the swimming pool in a Cwmbran school where my employer's sports and social club hired the place for an hour. In later years one raced for, and the other coached swimmers in, a club that operated out of the same pool. And on the wall of that pool was a mural painted by the schoolkids. I remember it well, at one end a hurdler throwing their leg over the final hurdle in the 110 metres, at the other a girl in a wheelchair putting an arrow into the inner ring on an archery target. 

And in the days when the London Marathon was a new fangled idea and the wheelchair marathon an even newer fangled one, there was a chap who used to "work out" in the gym in the sports centre attached to the other pool the swimming club used. A bloke who if I recall correctly came a cropper as a teenager in a motorbike accident. And who now had an upper body strength rivaling Arnie the Governor of California in his Mister Universe Days, who could bench press from his wheelchair five times the weight I could chest press, and who could propel his wheelchair round the race track for 400 metres faster than I could take my 18 speed racing bike.

And I tell you now the wierdest thing I ever experienced was scuba diving out in the Canary Islands one year when our party included a bloke on our boat who for whatever reason only had one and a half legs. IN the water he not only moved faster and with less effort than me he used less bloody air than I did, and I was supposed to be a "pro". 

So I need few lessons in the role of sport for those I shall with extreme political incorrectness call the physically handicapped. Least of all because I can be beaten hands down on a half mile swim on the surface in dive gear by a bloke with the business end of one leg missing and there's a bloke who does - or used to do - wheelchair marathons who can reach and sustain more than the TWENTY ONE MILES AN HOUR I can reach with my 18 speed pushbike over a 400 yard sprint.

Yet there are two mascots. ONE for the able bodied, and a totally different one for those competing on the basis of having some bits missing or not functional. For a country that's been run for thirteen years by a government preaching inclusivity at every possible  opportunity I think that's a pretty piss poor show and a poke in the eye with a sharp stick.