The London Olympics may bring us many joys – regeneration in the East End, the possibility of a Briton taking gold in "Whiff Whaff" (as Boris Johnson referred to that embodiment of the Olympian ideal, table tennis), complete sclerosis on the tube – but apparently we can forget all about the one "legacy" that might have had genuine and lasting beneficial effects.
2012 target to get Britons active has 'been missed'" was the headline in the Evening Standard. Progress thus far has been so miniscule ("statistics are edging up but it is less than 1%," says Sport England's chief executive, Jennie Price) that it seems there's no chance of us achieving the aim of 2 million more people breaking into the odd trot, still less of their darkening the doors of their local gym.
This should come as no surprise. Sport is now a vicarious, rather than a participatory, aspect of our culture. We don't actually do sport ourselves: we pay others vast sums of money to do it for us. But how have we got here? It's always struck me as odd that some of the most ardent sports fans possess physiques that suggest powerful development of specific muscles – those required to dislodge a ring pull or prize open the cardboard around a delivery pizza, for instance – but little in the way of what is conventionally thought of as exercise. "I'm really into sport" doesn't mean that you are rarely seen without racquet or ball. It means spending hours in front of the television. And for this, I blame Nick Hornby. Now it may strike some as a little hard to lay the lard, as it were, of our sports-obsessed nation on the popular novelist's shoulders. But it was around the publication of his book Fever Pitch in the early 1990s that a shift occurred. Suddenly all sorts of people (mainly, but not exclusively, men) who hitherto might have held forth about a book they'd read, an exhibition they'd been to, a play they'd seen, had a new conversational opener: "Did you see the match last night?" It was universally assumed that the question required no further elaboration. Everyone knew what "the match" was. Further, at some level it carried the sinister implication that you ought to have seen "the match", or could at least furnish some explanation for having missed it. Because of course you wanted to see "the match", didn't you? (And if not, what kind of weirdo were you?) That cringe-making title given to football, "the beautiful game", said it all: watching sport had been elevated to the same cultural level as the high- and middle- brow arts. And now sport was culture, you didn't have to engage with it in the same way. Seeing it on the box became as admirable a pursuit as going to a gallery (but not painting yourself), or spending an evening at the theatre (while never treading the boards either). But sport-as-culture went far beyond agreeing that there was style and grace to be admired in a batsman such as David Gower, or that there was elegance in the sports writing of Christopher Martin-Jenkins or Alan Watkins. It was a total embrace of everything that "sport" represented, and that included and became dominated by the oafish, anti-intellectual mentality of the crowd. It was an easy move at a time when "irony" was so in vogue that there were pitfalls in taking anything at face value and the Modern Review was in its pomp, proclaiming its mission to cover "low culture for highbrows", giving equal weight to Roland Barthes and Bart Simpson.
Such equivalence ignored the challenges and higher pleasures that accompany engagement with great culture, falsely suggesting that it was only available to an elite (when our libraries, museums and radio stations are free for all), while lauding the virtues of the new mateyness. It said it was classless: in fact it merely insulted lower socio-economic groups by implying they were incapable of appreciating anything more than what was to be found in the lowest common denominator. Popular, mass entertainment certainly has its place. But when I replace Blazing Saddles, The Naked Gun or The Spy Who Loved Me on my DVD shelf, having watched any one of them for probably the 200th time, I don't kid myself that I've participated in an activity in any way virtuous or improving, enjoyable though it may have been. "Sport", as it is known in this country, falls into exactly the same category. But even here there is an important difference. Few of us have the talent to be a new Sinatra or even a winner of Pop Idol. We are all, however, biologically designed to exercise our bodies in the way that sports demand. That is why the Olympics is supposed to celebrate something universal – the best of what humankind is capable of in terms of physical achievement. It's time to recalibrate our attitude towards sport, strip it of its unwarranted cultural position, and recognise it should be as much about participation as relaxation. "Just do it," as a brand of supposedly sporting footwear has it.