There's a surprise!

In a development that most observers are labelling "catastrophic" -- but few are surprised by -- a proposed deal to sell the London Olympic stadium to West Ham United football club has fallen through. Legal challenges from two other clubs -- Tottenham Hotspur and the mighty Leyton Orient -- led the Olympic legacy folks to conclude that it would be better to scrap the deal and start afresh. They will now start the search for a tenant, with the favoured bidder likely to be....West Ham United! There's a good summary of the story in The Guardian.

Who are the winners and losers here? One big winner is West Ham United, which will avoid the capital costs of converting the stadium into something more suitable for football, and -- assuming they wind up renting the place -- will find it much easier to walk away when they realise it's a lousy football location, as they inevitably will. (Because of the running track, the closest seats for football will apparently be 35 metres from the touchlines). UK Athletics, the governing body for track and field sports, is another winner. The track will now definitely be retained, at government insistence, so UK Athletics can now proceed with a bid to host the World Athletics Championships in 2017. This is another event that promises to be a bottomless money pit, though as the main competitor appears to be Doha, Qatar, the London bid's success cannot be taken for granted.

And the losers? Well, imagine that, it's the UK taxpayer! You may not have managed to score any Games tickets in the farcically botched lottery, but you can still feel like you're involved, because Lord Coe and his pals will shortly be visiting you with another bill that needs paying.

The estimated £95 million post-Olympics conversion cost will now have to be met out of the public purse, with the taxpayers of Newham, one of London's poorer boroughs, likely to have to cough up £40 million. Estimated rent for the football tenant (probably West Ham) is £2 million a year -- this for a stadium that will have cost the better part of a billion pounds by the time it's ready! That rent won't even cover half of the estimated post-Games running costs of £5 million per year. Unless concerts and other events can be found to make up the shortfall, the taxpayer will be on the hook for that too, for as long as the stadium remains in use. And that's not to mention the subsidy that will be needed if UK Athletics gets to host the 2017 World Championships.

Remember the Millennium Dome, another fatuous vanity project that was only turned around when private investors took it over and turned it into the successful O2 Arena? It looks as if the Olympic Stadium could be an even bigger boondoggle, because the private sector just threw up its hands and walked away.