Oh no, it's the Compulsory Olympics

SINGAPORE, JULY 2005: London was sentenced to host the 2012 Olympic Games. A public relations team including HRH the Princess Royal, Sebastian Coe and Tony Blair delivered a pitch of such unctuous piety that only a gang of Nazi child-butchers could have rejected it.

(Back at home we had no interest in it at all until we realised that we were head to head with France, at which point it rightly became a matter of life and death.)

It's just as well we got our gloating in early since within 24 hours of the decision we had the London suicide bombings, and our attention snapped back to the real world.

Our Olympic "team" were now forced to confront the implications of their sanctimonious rhetoric, and with the rose-tinted spectacles off, the vision began to morph. Their Field of the Cloth of Gold, with its countless sports pavilions, flags fluttering to the horizon, seemed more like acres of toxic wasteland, slum clearance and swamp.

From the warm glow of the Star Trek transport system emerged a yard of old railway sidings, a dead bus and a bloke from the local planning authority.

We know that our leaders are incapable of costing out anything more complex than lunch, so it goes without saying that the original budget began to look on the low side (and has now tripled). The only people in the country who would have forgotten to account for VAT were of course in charge of the bid. They have now very sensibly added this in plus an extra £0.4 billion to hire a firm to ensure the costs are kept down (yes). Obviously I've already bid for the job of keeping that firm on track, and created an infinite set of untraceable subsidiaries, each of which ... (you get the picture).

Most worrying of all, however, the alleged nation of bright-eyed, rosy-cheeked nymphs and shepherds eagerly skipping in a summer's breeze now looks more like the most obese country in Europe, slobbing its SUVs around a desolate urban landscape searching for pies.

So today UK Sport has launched an initiative to find tall people, who will be invited to join (or perhaps to be) our rowing, handball and volleyball teams in 2012.

This is a start but it's simply not bold enough: we should return the Olympics to a genuine contest between amateurs on a truly level playing field. Every nation has to enter every event, and it must select its team entirely at random, by picking names from a hat. So, there you are contentedly pursuing your career as neurosurgeon, armed robber, wholesale fruiterer etc when you hear the good news that you've been selected to represent the nation.

The bad news is you drew the pole vault.

Sport for all indeed.