FEEDING THE OLYMPIARCHS


STEPHEN HUGH-JONES | ON LANGUAGE AND LIFE

FEEDING THE OLYMPIARCHS

The London Olympic games will break several world records, predicts Stephen Hugh-Jones. Including those for wasting public money, overrunning budgets, inconveniencing the public, and indulging the arrogance of the organisers ...

Special to MORE INTELLIGENT LIFE

Is there no limit to the arrogance of those who run the Olympic Games? To their gargantuan appetite for public subsidy? To the readiness of politicians to feed them? London is to host this showcase of commercial athletics in 2012. And from what we've seen so far, the answer to all these questions is no.

Baron Pierre de Coubertin, who dreamed up the Olympics in 1894, had a noble slogan, Not the winning but the taking part. At their Lausanne HQ, his successors still prattle of the Olympic movement. In the puff-pastry of their website, you'll discover that it even has an ethos, Olympism.

All those words are empty breath. Since the 1980s, when an ingenious Spaniard, Juan Antonio Samaranch, began to build a one-time sporting event into a giant sports conglomerate, the driving force of the Olympics has been money.

Other people's money, mostly. And its misuse.

I don't mean the idiot sums—that's their choice—poured in by sponsors and broadcasters: over 2001-04, $1.4 billion and $2.2 billion respectively for the International Olympic Committee alone, the top level of the Olympic ziggurat. Nor yet back-stage corruption, claimedly sorted out since Samaranch's time, when some IOC members readily sold their support as rival cities vied to host the games.

No: the issues are public money and its open mis-spending. All at the cost of taxpayers in cities, and thus countries, daft enough to want the Olympics, and unlucky enough, in the characteristically Olympian wording of Lausanne, to be "granted" them. Montreal only recently paid off the last of the bonds it issued to finance its games in 1976. God knows—the Greeks certainly don't—when the final costs of the 2004 Athens Olympics will be met.

Leave aside the Chinese puzzle of Beijing 2008, London 2012 will surely go the same way. In 2005, its public budget was, supposedly, £3.4 billion: £2.4 billion for the games themselves, a further £1 billion for "regenerating" their main site in dumpsville east London. Last March the government confessed to £9.3 billion: regeneration apart, £5.5 billion for Britain's new 'Olympic Delivery Authority', plus a fat £2.8 billion for "contingencies". Few but believers in Santa Claus and the tooth fairy doubt that that £2.8 billion will be called on. And very probably exceeded.

For what? Notably, a shiny new 80,000-seat stadium, whose estimate is so far 75% up to £500 million, and whose later use, even when seating is cut to 25,000 after the games, no one knows; an architecturally cutting-edge (ie, budget-busting) aquatics centre; a stadium for track cycling, a sport for which few Britons give a damn. Oh, and £600 million of security.

Plus, noisily puffed to justify the rest, sundry public improvements, mainly in transport. Fair enough—except that most reflect not London's long-term needs but the two-week demands of a Swiss-based athletics multinational.

It is cheerily admitted today that the 2005 figures were a support-catching sham. Even the new ones draw such airy comments, this one on the cost of the aquatics centre, as "I'm not sure where we are going to finish up ... the important thing is that it does the job that is required." So much for cost-control.

You might find arrogance enough in all that. You would be wrong. This week we learned some travel plans. Spectators' cars, let alone parking, will simply be banned from anywhere near the eight main competition sites, to make these "the greenest games in modern times ... We want to accelerate the shift to public transport seen in London in recent years." And who, pray, are the "we" that have taken it upon themselves thus to nanny the British nation out of its cars? The voice of God? The Queen? The government? No. The Olympic (sic) Delivery Authority.

Happily for some, it has a further transport scheme: one lane in several key roads across London will be reserved for the 80,000 (re-sic) true Olympians; competitors, media folk and, top of the heap, officials and IOCocrats. Who, while we hoi polloi pollute the air with redoubled fumes from our gridlocked cars, will no doubt be proceeding greenly on foot, by bicycle or in rickshaws.

No doubt. Funny that Nanny Green also plans to order a private fleet of 3,500 new cars.

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