Text 6. Olympic Games

In the pursuit of Olympic gold medals, they say, it is not so much the winning but the taking part that counts. In the pursuit of the Olympic games, winning is everything. How sweet, then, for Britons that London this week saw off Madrid, Moscow, New York and the firm favourite, Paris, to stage the 30th Olympiad in 2012, becoming the first city to host the games for a third time.

London can bask in such recognition of its status as a world city, but. status isn't everything. The real question is whether hosting the Olympics will actually be good for Londoners. Past experience and current plans suggest that London 2012-which already sounds like an optometrist's diagnosis-might not be.

Parts of London's plan are undoubtedly wise. Temporary stadiums will be put up in scenic parts of London such as Greenwich (for equestrians) and Horse Guards Parade (for beach volleyball). Existing venues such as Wimbledon (for tennis) and Lord's cricket ground (for archery) should be inexpensive and work well.

The problems start with the site of the Olympic complex. London's bid was reckoned to be strong on regeneration, which is another way of saying that its plan called for an enormous amount of new building. The main stadium and the athletes' village will be laid out on a slug-shaped area in the Lower Lea Valley, which despite its picturesque name is a wasteland three miles east of London's financial district that today is scarred by car-breakers' yards and derelict factories. Once home to food-processors and a sewage works, it has absorbed "two or three centuries of industrial abuse", according to David Stubbs, environmental manager for London's bid. All this will have to be cleaned up (with public money) before any building starts. Oh, and the site often floods.

Optimists point to the regeneration of Canary Wharf as an example of how London can turn an unloved no-man's land into a highly desirable address. But the task over the next seven years is on quite a different scale. Whereas the original Canary Wharf estate was a modest 87 acres, the Olympic park will be 500 acres, a big area than Hyde Park.

That means the games will cost a Few Olympics make money once у count the cost of such things as permanent stadiums and new transport links, where London is notoriously weak. The games that have made a profit, notably Los An les in 1984, did so by doing as little newbuilding as possible. Holger Preuss, an academic at Cologne University who has studied the economics of hosting 1 games, reckons that London's plans are wards the ambitious end of the scale.

The planned public subsidy for t games is £2.4 billion ($4.2 billion), split between the National Lottery, the London Development Agency and council-t payers in London. But that figure is necessarily rough: nobody knows, after this week's co-ordinated terrorist attack on London, what the security budget will in seven years' time. As deadlines approach, costs can escalate. The budget for the Athens games started at €4.6 billiion ($5.5 billion), but the final price tag thought to have been almost twice that.

Olympophiles counter that the games justify a large public subsidy by boostjng tourism. But, unlike Barcelona in 19$ Seoul in 1988 or Tokyo in 1964, London 2012 has no need to be put on the map. SI fan Szymanski, an economist at Imperial College's Tanaka Business School in Lo don, reckons that although the Olympics might attract those tourists who like the sport, it will drive away those who come London for its art and theatre. Set again Britain's £1.2 trillion economy, any dire boost is likely to be tiny.

Others argue the games will create sue exuberance that consumers will rush 1 the shops filled with a desire to buy thing But it is anyone's guess whether an expensive feel-good factor will be what Britain economy needs in 2012. Portugal made bid to host the Euro 2004 football championships when its economy was rosy, bi ended up paying for it when growth had slowed. That did not feel so good.

To reduce the risk of an expensive mess, London needs to avoid three traps. The first is a habit of mismanaging big public projects, delivering them late and over-budget. This disease has effected the Millennium Dome, the rebuilding of Wembley football stadium and the refurbishment of the capital's execrable Underground. Here the prescription is to settle the final design from the outset, to procure intelligently (not always choosing the cheapest), and to start building as soon as possible.

Second, London's mayor, Ken Livingstone, must be prevented from using the Olympics as a way to extract money from the government for his pet projects. Instead, his task will be to barge through the numerous obstacles to the Olympic plan. One property developer who negotiated permission to build a large development in a neighbouring part of east London says he ended up talking to around a hundred planning and development agencies and their offshoots. Each has slightly different hopes for the Olympic legacy. Pushing the project through on time and on budget will mean ignoring many of them.

Third, between now and 2012 there will be the inevitable souring of the elation at winning the bid. Britain's famously critical media will seize on cost over-runs, higher taxes and, quite possibly, the idea of spending so much money in London-easily the most prosperous part of the country. Of course, Tony Blair, who has won so much praise for fighting for the bid, will be long gone by then. It will fall to his successor to stay the course.

(The Source: adapted from www.economist.com/node/4167285 ).

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