It's starting to look as if the construction phase of the London Olympic Games will turn out to have been the easy part, thanks to the limitless amounts of money that have been thrown at the project. All the facilities have been ready for some time and have been put through their paces in a series of test events. It's an impressive achievement.
However....the "soft" parts of the Games -- security, transport, even ticketing -- seem to be a different story. Take, for example, the sale of tickets, a source of scandal ever since the organising committee, LOCOG, first revealed its plans to the public. Too many tickets reserved for Olympic bigwigs or sponsors, eye-watering prices, a botched ballot to allocate places at the most popular events, and so on. Although LOCOG has repeatedly claimed that the Games are largely a sell-out, it has usually been able to head off criticism by magicking up more tickets out of nowhere to silence the baying mob.
Then there's transport. It remains to be seen how well the Tube and the rest of the transport system cope when the events actually begin, but the past week has brought clear evidence that some outright dumb decisions were made right at the outset. Cracks in a viaduct forced the authorities to close part of the M4 motorway, the main road linking Heathrow Airport with central London (and the main Games sites) for several days last week. There were fears that the country would suffer massive embarrassment if athletes and Olympic bigwigs were stuck in traffic jams as soon as they left the airport.
The M4 has now reopened, but the incident belatedly caused a few commentators to wonder why Heathrow, which regularly operates at 98% capacity, was chosen as the main point of entry for the Games in the first place. One of London's other airports, Stansted, is currently underutilised. It's closer to the Olympic village than Heathrow, and connected almost door-to-door by motorway, eliminating the need for most of the participants to pass through the centre of London. Should have been a no-brainer.
Now there are problems with security. With two weeks to go until the tedious opening ceremony begins (which would be a subject for a posting in its own right), the Government has discovered that G4S, the private company awarded a £250 million (!) contract to provide much of the on-site security, is coming up way short in its recruitment efforts. As a result, the armed forces will step in, providing a further 3,500 servicepersons to fill the gap. Some lucky squaddies will be rotated back from Lashkar Gar to Stratford just for the duration of the Games, always assuming that the armed forces can find somewhere to house them.
Cue massive amounts of finger-pointing. Labour blames the Tories for not picking up on the problem sooner, the Tories blame Labour for giving G4S the contract in the first place, and both parties are dumping on G4S. No doubt the company should have owned up to its recruitment and training problems sooner, but here's the thing: the contract awarded to G4S back in 2010 required it to provide 2,000 security personnel. It was only at the end of 2011 that LOCOG realised that it had seriously underestimated the task, and asked G4S to provide a total of 10,000! It's small wonder that this has proved challenging at such short notice.
The guards who have been hired are likely to be top drawer. According to G4S, many of those who showed up for interview were only there because they had been threatened with withdrawal of unemployment benefits if they didn't. The company fears that a large percentage of those it has hired won't actually bother turning up anyway, the training period having topped up their bank accounts and renewed their eligibility for benefits. The company can't even be certain that the security guards will be able to speak English. Hey, no problem -- neither can a lot of the visitors, so this should make them feel right at home.
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