When London was awarded the 2012 Olympics, organizers promised to get two million more people in England involved in sports and physical activity.

But with the Games in less than 18 months, that goal now looks elusive.

London’s original pledge evolved into a plan to get one million more people around England playing sports three or more times a week for at least 30 minutes at a time, known as the 3x30 plan. Even that target is proving elusive.

And in a nation that is among the fattest in Europe, surveys by Sport England, the governing body for community sports, indicate that the number of adults doing zero moderate sports activity rose by nearly 300,000 from 2005 to the fall of 2010.

Inadequate planning, a change in government, severe funding cutbacks to sports groups and an apparent overestimation of the impact the Olympics can have on mass participation have all forced a rethinking of England’s Olympic legacy.

The average person may feel a disconnect from elite athletes, said Mike Weed, a professor of sport in society at Canterbury University, while the most sedentary might be put off by perceived pressure to lose weight and become more active.

London is hardly the first host city to struggle with its Olympic legacy. Roads, airports and rail systems are improved while lingering sporting benefits remain indistinct.

Six years after Albertville, France, hosted the 1992 Winter Olympics, the figure-skating arena and speed-skating oval there were abandoned. The magnificent Olympic stadium showcased during the 2008 Beijing Games, known as the Bird’s Nest, was seldom being used a year and a half later.

Research on the Olympic Games stimulating mass participation in sports has not produced encouraging results. In 2007, the Culture, Media and Sport Committee of the British House of Commons concluded that “no host country has yet been able to demonstrate a direct benefit from the Olympic Games in the form of a lasting increase in participation.”

A study of the 2000 Sydney Games showed that while seven Olympic sports had a slight increase afterward in Australia, nine showed a decline.

After the 2002 Commonwealth Games, held in Manchester, England, “there appears to have been no recorded impact on sports participation levels” in the country’s northwest, Fred Coalter, a professor of sports studies at the University of Stirling in Scotland, wrote before London won the 2012 Olympic bid.

Weekend fitness enthusiasts in Manchester seemed to bear this out. “The Olympics are up here and we’re down here,” said Asha Solanki, 30, who works in marketing and participates in martial arts. “How many people do you know who do the 400-meter hurdles?”


By JERÉ LONGMAN