I’m
really pleased to see the blog about Jill Reynolds and the link to the
heartfelt obituary in The Guardian.
I’m
writing this blog a couple of week after the end of the Olympic Games in London
and on the day that the Paralympic Games open.
The focus
of the Olympics is very much on ‘youth’. Although the Opening ceremony looked
back over British history, it culminated with the lighting of the very
spectacular cauldron and with the torches, which had been bought in by ageing
stars, being passed to the next (younger) generation. Indeed, the whole of the
Olympic focuses on the youth of the world coming together to be ‘citius, altius
, fortius’ (faster, higher, stronger). Added to this is the very idea of the
Olympic ‘legacy’ strongly suggests something valuable being passed on to a
younger generation.
Tied in
with this overt focus on youth, is a sub-text of elite individualism in which
gifted (young) individuals train for years on end to be the best.
However,
the focus on elite youth overlooks the importance of social structures in which
older people play important roles as coaches, officials and ‘gamesmakers’. The
tendency to focus on the athletes who ‘medal’, while creating moments of
undeniable drama, does mean that there is a real danger of overlooking and
misreading what the ‘legacy’ of the London Olympics could be.
Politicians
have been quick to jump on the feel good bandwagon of medal victories as a
straw to grasp as the economy bumps along a very murky bottom.
But I
think this misses the point. What surely more significant is the value of
exercise in promoting and maintaining well-being throughout life. A study published in The Lancet to coincide with the build-up to the
Olympics suggested
that lack of exercise is now causing as many deaths as smoking
across the world. The report, , estimates that about a third of adults are not
doing enough physical activity, causing 5.3m deaths a year. That equates to
about one in 10 deaths from diseases such as heart disease, diabetes and breast
and colon cancer.
In 1978, Susan Sontag suggested that we are all ‘dual
citizens’ of the land of the well and the land of the sick, ‘Although we all
prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at
least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.’
Jill’s last illness, which she set out so candidly in her blogs, showed her becoming
a citizen of the land of the sick.
However, wouldn’t it be great to have a legacy we could
all share in? Such a legacy might be possible if there was wider recognition
that it is only by creating social structures which enable more people to
remain in the land of the well for as long as possible.
More of us (of all ages) would benefit from this than
from the fetishisation of youth in which chronological age becomes a proxy for
fitness and health. Well-being and the opportunity to engage in physical
exercise should not be age-rationed but promoted as something that involves
people at all stages of life. It might even mean that we would not have to
comment on a 54 year old rider winning a gold medal.
It will be interesting to see how age plays out in the
Paralympic Games.
Dr. Jonathan Hughes
