Olympic Village site visit

The Velodrome

Stadium entrance

The Aquatics Centre

The Aquatics Centre

View towards Docklands

Waiting for the bus

Entering the site

The International Broadcast Centre / Main Press Centre

Olympic Stadium

Olympic Village

Today I was part of the visit to the Olympic Village site organised by the London & South East Region of the Industrial Mission Association. We met in Stratford to join the bus and, led by our informative tour guide Victoria, were taken on an hour-long journey around the whole site.

After our visit we went to St Pauls Stratford, where Revd. Kevin Woolmer is Chaplain to the Construction Workers for the New Stratford City Shopping Centre and the Construction Workforce of the London 2012 Olympics. There we were led in a theological reflection on our visit by Fr. Dermot Tredget of Douai Abbey.

We thought initially about the complexity of relations between the large number of stakeholders involved and the difficulty of ensuring that all stakeholders can properly be heard.

We looked at several biblical texts (1 Corinthians 9. 24-27, 2 Timothy 2. 5, 2 Timothy 4. 7, and Hebrews 12. 1) which helped us reflect on the pressure that the organisers and athletes are under to succeed. Several of these passages, although not all, commend competing and completing as more important than winning and one commends competing within the rules (particularly relevant in the light of bloodgate and the recent football fines and bans on clubs and players perceived to have cheated).

We noted that, in her article A Hymn to Life: The Sports Theology of Pope John Paul II, Connie Lasher writes that, "Pope John Paul II speaks of sport as a school of human virtue that ennobles the individual and becomes a vehicle of friendship and social interaction on the part of athletes and spectators." Sport has the potential to enrich and develop people but can bring perils as well as promises.

Small group discussions then resulted in the following reflections:

• the Olympics is elitist and the poor won't be there (e.g. no cheap tickets for locals);
• the legacy should be the priority and a part of this could include community organising to ensure that the community is recognised and heard as a stakeholder;
• the chaplain's role is a prophetic speaking to the structures of the organisations involved as much as it is pastoral with those working in the organisations;
• chaplaincy involves continual negotiation as the parameters within which they work constantly change on a huge project such as this;
• effective pastoral work among workers generates a feed upwards so that, for example, one construction company specifically sought out the chaplain to arrange specific dates and times for visits to their site as a result of hearing from their staff of the benefit felt in having the chaplain visit.

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Mark Heard - Lonely Moon.