Londoners have more than a few gripes about the Olympics, which are only days away after seven years of work backed by billions of taxpayers' pounds. Can the event be a fillip for a weary government and a sceptical public, asks MARK HENNESSY, London Editor
SHAKING RAINDROPS from their coats, weary commuters stand on escalators at King’s Cross station in London with the boisterous tones of Boris Johnson ringing in their ears. “Hi, folks. This is the mayor here. This is the greatest moment in the life of London for 50 years. We’re welcoming more than a million people a day to our city, and there is going to be huge pressure on the transport network. Don’t get caught out. Get online and plan your journey.”
The lack of enthusiasm from his homeward-bound audience is understandable. Many fear their journeys could get even longer in the weeks ahead. King’s Cross is one of the city’s predicted choke points for the early-morning and late-afternoon rush of hundreds of thousands of people to and from the Olympic Park, in east London.
For much of the past seven years London 2012 has defied the traditional pessimistic British view that they are no longer capable of delivering on the world stage. The Olympic Park was built on time and within budget, while London 2012 was repeatedly praised for its preparations by the International Olympic Committee (IOC).
Now, however, the pessimism is back with a vengeance as Londoners cope with blocked car lanes, overcrowded trains, poor summer weather and, most prominently, fears about security.
Among the complainants in the past few days are hauliers in east London who failed to get any softening of the restrictions that have been imposed on them for eight weeks. One of them, Graham Phelps, the head of Phelps Transport in Hackney, says they abandoned their legal action because they could not face the bill. “I think they looked at our companies and thought none was a real financial threat. We are suffering, and it hasn’t even started yet.”
The scale of disruption is illustrated by Twickenham and surrounding boroughs in west London, which will host six Olympic events, including cycling road races on July 28th and 29th. For at least part of the games, 300 roads in the area will be closed. Despite an information campaign by Richmond Borough Council, locals remain confused about when some of the roads will reopen.
Transport has dominated Londoners’ gripes, particularly the closure of lanes on key arteries to all but Olympic traffic; the so-called Zil lanes, named after routes used by Soviet leaders.
Some of the Olympic closures have not yet come into force, but drivers fearing fines of £130 (€165) are already staying clear, thus causing tailbacks elsewhere. In an ITV poll this week, nearly half of those questioned believed London was poorly prepared. The feeling has been exacerbated by the inability of G4S to hire the 10,400 security guards it was contracted to supply.
Having basked in favourable waters, the London organisers, who use management-speak worthy of the BBC satire Twenty Twelve, have looked irritated as the public-relations tide has turned. Each problem is highlighted, sometimes exaggerated. The failure to sell all the tickets for soccer is portrayed as a disaster, but Senegal v United Arab Emirates was never likely to have been a major attraction.
In a sense the London Organising Committee of the Olympic Games, known as Locog, is reaping a harvest from years of wanting to control every item to the nth degree. Equally, London 2012 will be the first games to have to cope with the advent of social media, where stories, many of them unverified, can emerge in torrents.
This week social media featured when bus drivers got lost en route to Stratford, and tweets from Australian athletes made the headlines even before their four-hour journey to Stratford had ended. By contrast, at the 1996 games, in Atlanta, as the Olympic medallist Matthew Pinsent has pointed out, athletes had to stage sit-down protests before anyone took notice of far worse problems.
IT HAS BEENa long road from July 6th, 2005, when thousands gathered in Trafalgar Square to celebrate London's winning the right to host the games – just hours before the city mourned the 52 people killed by terrorists on 7/7. Greece, the home of the Olympics, is claimed by some to have had the key role in deciding that the games went to London rather than Madrid. The Greek IOC delegate, according to some sources, mistakenly voted for Paris rather than Madrid. According to experts in IOC politics, had it gone the other way it would have led to Madrid beating London in the final round of voting.
London’s bid had begun two years earlier, in 2003, though it struggled to get off the ground. This led the campaign’s chief, Sebastian Coe, to relook at the plans in the snow in a Swiss chalet. Few believed London could do it. Labour’s Gordon Brown, then chancellor of the exchequer, provided the financial guarantees only when he was assured that it had no chance.
The British efforts were badly affected by a BBC Panorama investigation into the Athens games in 2004, when it sent undercover reporters to test IOC delegates’ interest in bribes. Still recovering from the Salt Lake City bribery scandal, the IOC was wary of spending “seven years under the microscope of the UK media”, as Michael Payne, the author of Olympic Turnaround, has noted.
So far the Olympic Development Authority is expected to live within its budget of £9.3 billion (€12 billion), although this is the figure that was finally agreed rather than the one originally proposed.
The former London mayor Ken Livingstone might be the man most responsible for bringing the games to London, but Johnson will wear the garland. Originally, Livingstone and his team believed the games, including the regeneration of the Stratford district of east London, could be provided for £2.4 billion (€3.1 billion). Brown, who saw the games as Blair’s baby, insisted on charging VAT – which “no previous Olympics had ever paid”, Livingstone said.
Brown’s budgeting, in the end, was more accurate. In all, hosting the Olympics will cost the UK more than £11 billion, including an additional sum of nearly £2 billion (€2.6 billion) on transport – though the prime minister, David Cameron, promises a return of £13 billion (€16.7 billion).
Security concerns had arisen even before the G4S controversy. In May MPs complained that Locog’s original costing of £282 million (€361 million), which had by then risen to £553 million (€709 million), had been a “finger-in-the-air” guess. For now, British ministers insist that G4S’s failures have been dealt with by the deployment of thousands of soldiers, many of whom will have to sleep under canvas for the next month.
There is potential for further trouble from a company struggling to cope. Military chiefs insist that if they are involved they will be in control. Even Friday’s opening ceremony, the €35 million Isles of Wonder extravaganza, directed by Danny Boyle and featuring cows, sheep and rain clouds, has been shortened by 30 minutes. This is to ensure spectators can get home by public transport, which is due to close at 2.30am, once heads of state and government are safely away. Taoiseach Enda Kenny is due to attend a reception at Buckingham Palace on the night, before being taken, with other leaders, by bus to Stratford.
IF THE GAMESpass off peacefully and successfully, the G4S security failures might not leave a sour taste, especially if the controversy is overshadowed by a flush of British medals. If not, however, it will crush Cameron's hope that the games will give his administration, which is struggling with the economy and doubts about its competence, a much-needed half-time fillip.
Throughout the seven years, Labour and Conservative ministers, in turn, have insisted that the games offer a once-in-a-century opportunity to revitalise east London. There was much to improve. The four boroughs surrounding the Lea Valley Olympic lands – Hackney, Tower Hamlets, Newham and Waltham Forest – are among the city’s poorest.
Nearly half of the communities are chronically disadvantaged, and 5 per cent are listed as among the most deprived in England; economically fragile and with weak social fabric. Faced with a derelict site, the builders had a mammoth undertaking. New power lines had to be laid in two six-kilometre tunnels. Usually, the work would take four years, twice the time available.
About 220 dilapidated buildings on the site, which had been used as a scrapyard for 40 years, had to be demolished, but sustainably so. Because of Stratford’s industrial past – the area produced the world’s first plastics, among other things – the ground beneath was seriously contaminated, says Saphina Sharif, a civil engineer who managed the enabling works on the site. The soil was separated and rinsed, and magnets and other equipment harvested the century-old residues of mercury, arsenic and other pollutants.
Because the 80,000-seat stadium would need to have a life afterwards, designers opted to build it in layers. The upper layers could be removed afterwards to leave a 25,000-seater. Once drawn up, another problem arose: wind. Ian Crockford, a project manager on the site, says they had “opened up a new corridor in London, straight up from the River Thames, and you could feel the wind”.
Without a roof, London 2012 could have become the only games in history without world records because winds exceeded permitted levels. “It was an absolute no-no,” says Crockford. The solution eluded them until six weeks before the stadium plans were to be unveiled both to the IOC and to the world, in November 2007. In the end the architects opted for a lightweight cable-net roof assembled like a bicycle wheel, supporting a thin fabric roof; the solution used a fraction of the steel needed for other options.
Meeting tougher environmental targets than those set by any previous games, the organisers committed to bringing half of the building materials by rail rather than by road. “Eight trainloads a day, approximately 1,500 tons per train, Monday to Saturday,” says the logistics manager, Peter Cummings. Each carried the loads of 75 trucks, but with a fifth of the carbon-dioxide emissions.
Irish companies, such as PJ Elliott and John Sisk, were among those that won contracts at the Olympic Park, where 1,000 Irish people worked for much of the time. The companies have been unable to trumpet their involvement, though contract rules will relax once the IOC caravan moves off to Brazil.
THROUGHOUT, THE OLYMPICorganisers have been plagued by criticisms that they have not done enough for the local communities that are blighted by unemployment. Labour's Tessa Jowell, the Olympics minister under Tony Blair who has stayed involved, insists that promises have been kept, saying that of the 30,000 people who worked in the Olympic Park, 20 per cent were residents of the host boroughs.
Some of the figures are open to interpretation, however, because of reports that people moved to Newham and surrounding boroughs, or simply managed to get a postal address there, to have a better chance of getting an Olympics job.
Nearly 250 locals qualified for apprenticeships – a third of the total – while Jowell argues that locals will be well placed to get some of the 50,000 jobs that are to be created after the games when homes and shops are built there. One of the apprentices who worked on the Aquatics Centre, Francis Haffner, who came to London in 2000 from Sierra Leone, is among the success stories, promoted heavily by Locog in a promotional video.
“Before, I wasn’t doing anything, I didn’t have any skills. As a qualified person I have a better chance of getting a job, so I’m really happy about my future now,” he says. “Coming from Sierra Leone, it was really hard to sort of catch up. I just came from a war, basically, so I was a bit traumatised. I didn’t know anything . . . All I want to do is just keep going until I become successful, and maybe be an inspiration to other young people that you can come from nothing and become something.”
The verdict on London 2012 will not be written even after the Olympic flame, which seven million people saw during its passage through the Britain and Ireland, has left. In 1992 Barcelona set the bar for the benefits the games can bring, spurring the rejuvenation of the city’s waterfront and helping to change the city’s reputation. Elsewhere, however, the record is patchy. The Bird’s Nest stadium, in Beijing, is rarely used, while many of the sports facilities built in Athens are almost derelict.
In the coming years a permanent use has to be found for London’s stadium; one of the proposals is that the West Ham and Leyton Orient soccer clubs share it.
The president of the IOC, Jacques Rogge – “not always an easy man to please”, according to Margaret Ford, who led the housing-legacy plans – has testified to London’s success. “London has raised the bar on how to deliver a lasting legacy,” Rogge said recently.
The park’s media centre, home over the coming weeks to 21,000 journalists – twice the number of athletes – now has a preferred bidder that wants to turn it into a technology hub. Once the Olympics and Paralympics conclude, the park will close for a year to remove unwanted paraphernalia before it re-emerges as the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park.
“Beginning this autumn, they will be surrounded by some of the best family housing that London has to offer. It is quite a phenomenal achievement and has never been done before,” says Ford.
An outstanding issue is who will live in the converted athletes’ village, which will have to be retrofitted with kitchens, and the other developments to be built in phases over the next decade.
Newham alone has 32,000 people on its waiting list, and locals fear they will be priced out in a race with young professionals and graduates. But that’s for the future.
London 2012 is just days away. For now, complaints outnumber joyous declarations from Londoners. Cameron, Johnson and Coe must hope they will be drowned out by the cheers in Stratford.
