John Amaechi, the British former basketball player who was a director on the London 2012 Diversity Board, has claimed the Olympic legacy has not been completely fulfilled and described some of the rhetoric surrounding it is "a nonsense".

The 42-year-old former NBA player hinted that the London 2012 legacy has not helped all those minority groups it promised to target.

"A lot of the legacy talk is a nonsense and it always was a nonsense and there was never going to be any," Amaechi (pictured top) told insidethegames.

"It was privileged people who believed that young people living on the 13th floor of an estate would somehow have their lives enhanced by being able to see into the bowl of the Olympic Park.

"The legacy was kept wonderfully nebulous, because that way you can't pin anybody down.

"If you look at how it started, the Games were won by pretty brown children in Singapore.

"So the legacy was implicitly what would happen to those pretty brown children - opportunity for advancement, ability to engage in sport, whether sport or sport business - those were all implicit.

"What happened to the volunteers after - that was all implicit.

"And some parts of that have gone through well - what's happened to the volunteers: I think we've funnelled them really well into local businesses who thought 'right we've got somebody who's got great customer service skills and proven customer service skills in a really hectic environment'.

"I mean, can you imagine being the volunteer who's on the tube station at Paddington at rush hour, trying to help people get to where they need to go?

"That person can handle working in a shop, so we've done some great things with it.

"But the big, overall warm, fuzzy part of the legacy is unfulfilled."


Amaechi was keen, however, to praise the elements of the legacy that have had a positive impact on Britain, particularly where businesses and the economy is concerned.

"In terms of the business of the Games, the number of micro, small, medium-sized businesses that got contracts has never before been reached.

"The levels of local people involved in volunteering and ascending to positions of management, the level of training for the volunteers that actually amounted to what would be an NVQ, which was, for many of these volunteers, the first bit of education they ever got.

"The fact that we managed to translate that into a business credential, that all the partners of the Games would recognised.

"So you could go to a firm and say I had this ambassador training and it would translate into something on their books.

"So you can imagine the type of people involved in that was a very broad, diverse base."

Amaechi also believes last year's Olympics and Paralympics helped by offering opportunities to disabled workers and that this even helped to enhance the Games themselves.


"Diversity wise, in terms of disability, for example, a lot of the drivers of our cars were drivers with impairments, not for show, but because it's a role they could execute very well with just a tiny little technological twitch," he said.

"BMW gave us cars that were hand steered and hand driven.

"Problem solved.

"So we had this unique ability to integrate people.

"A driver with no legs?

"Yes.

"And I think it really enhanced the Games."

Amaechi also had some heavy criticism for UK Sport.

When asked for his thoughts on the Olympic funding reprieve for British Basketball, he said it was "completely irrelevant" and had his own ideas of where the financial support should be going.

"UK Sport and what they're doing is completely irrelevant," Amaechi passionately responded.

"Somebody tell me how millions of pounds into winning a medal can in any way be measured and this is my bollocks call with UK Sport.

"These are the guys that talk about 'everything we do is measured', somebody tell me how the emotional high from winning a medal - and what do we win in by the way: shooting things, archery, boats against landlocked countries...one of them is a sport that anybody who's a minority is not going to do, the other two are sports that minorities do and usually get arrested for.

"So none of that is useful.

"How about putting that into what we said we'd put it into - stopping young people from becoming excessively obese, because they are frightened out of sport because of terrible, emotionally illiterate, coaches when they're eight, who make them feel stupid, fat, ignorant, wrong and bad.

"If we did that alone, the benefits would manifest hugely.

"Even just in the NHS."

By Emily Goddard

Source: www.insidethegames.biz