In 1976, when I was living in Canada, the Olympic Games were held in Montreal. The mayor of that city, Jean Drapeau, bragged that "the Olympics could no more have a deficit than a man can have a baby". However, despite massive lottery funding, the Games lost a prodigious sum, and the debt incurred by the city of Montreal was only paid off by its long-suffering taxpayers a few years ago. As for the sports facilities that were created, the Olympic Stadium, a concrete monstrosity, was a nightmare for spectators and athletes alike. The retractable roof never worked. The Montreal Expos baseball team, which moved there from its previous home, was forced to relocate to another city because of abysmal attendances. The Alouettes football team, which also played there, went broke, and when a new football team was set up in Montreal, it made sure to stay well away from the accursed place.
I mention all of this to show that the positive spin that the Government is trying to impart to the soaring costs for the London Olympics should be taken with massive amounts of salt. The Barcelona Olympics are widely seen as the catalyst for the revival of that city, but it's a bit of a stretch to suggest that what works on the sunny shores of the Mediterranean will work as well on the boggy banks of the River Lea. Barcelona aside, can anyone name a city that has been positively transformed by the Olympics? We're not hearing much about the residual benefits in Athens, the most recent host, which should tell you something.
Everything that's intrinsic to the Games is transitory, almost by its very nature. To cite the most obvious example, the lack of any long-term future for the Olympic Stadium is evident from the fact that it is being designed to be largely dismantled right after the games, with the capacity falling from 80,000 to 25,000. Even this latter figure is far more than can ever be expected to show up for a track and field event in this country, yet the Government has more or less ruled out allowing it to be used for football. (Based on the experience in Montreal, no football team owner in his right mind would want to move into the thing anyway).
The Government is, of course, anxious to play up the non-sporting regeneration that is expected to take place in the East End of London. I have nothing against this -- I was brought up there. However, the pictures I have seen, including the fancy morphing CG stuff that shows how the area will evolve form its current mess into the Olympic Park, fill me with dread. It looks as if the main legacy of the Games will be a spaghetti of motorways that will, once the Games are over, be both hugely excessive for the area's needs and an absolute eyesore. The "athletes' village" will be transformed into housing, which is welcome in principle, but Montreal again provides a cautionary precedent here, with its legacy of ticky-tacky concrete boxes that nobody wanted to live in.
Then there are the numbers. It's true that the £9.3 billion latest estimate is an overstatement in some ways. It's not entirely clear that the cost of the athletes' village should count against the Games, if the homes really can be re-used afterwards. The VAT bill is an accounting entry, in the sense that the Government is paying itself. And the £2.7 bn contingeny may never be spent -- though from one report I read, £500 million of it has already been allocated, which bends the definition a bit.
Moreover, the £9.3 billion is not the entire cost. The cost of actually running the Games -- I've seen a figure of £ 2 billion -- is not included. Neither is a £7 billion investment in London's transport infrastructure, which the Government committed to in order to win the Games. Much of the residual benefit of the Games will be derived from this, rather than from the £9.3 billion spent on the Games facilities themselves.
If you add all these numbers together, the total spend that the Games have triggered comes close to £20 billion -- with the event itself still five years away. Can anyone imagine that there would have been any public appetite for holding the Games in London if a figure like this had been admitted at the outset? Of course not. So how did we get here? Last night Mihir Bose from the BBC offered the most plausible explanation: nobody in the Government, and very probably not even the bid team themselves, seriously imagined that London would actually be the successful bidder. So we blundered into this thing, and now we can't get out. Wow, that sounds like another part of the legacy that our Great Leader will leave behind when he moves on later this year: Iraq.
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