Audley's brother was found dead in a squalid bedsit
Friday August 15,2008
By John Dillon
IT was just a small newspaper report from the coroner’s court this week.
A 26-year-old man was found dead in a squalid bedsit, pumped with heroin and cocaine. A syringe was near his body. He had also been smoking cannabis.
You might wonder what this has to do with the Olympics? In fact, the connection is a potent and significant one. The dead man was the brother of boxing gold medallist Audley Harrison.
One member of a London family took the hard and redemptive route out of trouble and desperation to climb the most exalted medal podium of all.
Another, Vincent, succumbed tragically to the death traps of an increasingly dangerous and wayward city which is preparing to stage the next Games while tumbling towards a hellish social breakdown.
London 2012 will not be different from Beijing 2008 just because it will have no Water Cube. It will be taking place against as vastly different a public background as there could be from the state-ordained order and economic optimism here in China.
Audley Harrison is much derided because his pro boxing career has been so farcical. But do not forget that eight years ago he was a national hero; the super-heavyweight champion and winner of our first gold in the ring for 32 years.
Whatever you think of him now, it must be remembered that he fought his way out of tough circumstances to reach that pinnacle at Sydney 2000. A motherless child and one of eight brothers from the wild Stonebridge Park estate in Harlesden, he did some time inside.
Then he saved himself. Audley got into college and amateur boxing. Ultimately, the Olympics were the rescue route he carved out of his unpromising start to life.
He still deserves credit for it, even if he often drove his trainers barmy with frustration.
Even now, after taking so much flak, he is refusing to give up his professional dreams.
Audley will try again in Manchester on September 6 on the undercard of Amir Khan, who won a silver in Athens four years ago and in so doing also proved the capacity of sport to overcome our divisions.
These are timely reminders of its uplifting power. Boxing, especially, has this magic. It has saved countless street kids from disaster. Now it is being suggested as an antidote to the awful knife warfare among youngsters in our inner cities.
Yes, nearly all of those involved are black, like Harrison. But Britain also has a growing class of feral white gang kids. Amid all this, right on London 2012’s doorstep, there is a burgeoning new youth tribe of angry, religiously radicalised Asians too.
This is the make-up of the gritty area around the event site in east London, which the Games is supposed to revitalise.
It may as well be a different planet from the gleaming new city here.
This Games has been shocked by the murder of an American, the father-in-law of the US men’s volleyball coach.
Possibly, the killer had been crazed by the frustration of unemployment. But Beijing is spotlessly maintained, socially settled and crime free compared with London.
The 2012 Games are supposed to end the deprivation of the East End. We should be positive about that.
Yet from here, you cannot help but wonder how London can even attempt to run them, let alone create an engine of economic revitalisation.
There are hundreds of thousands of volunteers here who are all Chinese but have learnt a little English because they are so keen for the Games to be a success.
Merely in a five-mile radius around the London site, there must be 200 different languages spoken amid a population which is just about the most ethnically mixed of any city in the world.
How do you recruit thousands of worthwhile helpers in an area where English is not the mother tongue?
In the same area, there have been at least a dozen of the teenage knife murders currently terrifying the capital.
The Games could unite and redeem all these people. But just now, London is a city in which tension and separation are increasing. It faces huge social obstacles of a kind never confronted by any Games organisers before.
The challenge is massive. But we must believe that it can be overcome.
Because the other choice is despair. And the Olympics are not about that. Audley Harrison is our living proof of it.
If London can save itself like he did, sport and the Games will have pulled off another social miracle.
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