OLYMPICS 2012:With less than two years to the start of the London Olympics, the finishing line is in sight for the organisers and the pace of preparation is starting to heat up. OWEN GIBSONassesses how much ground is left to cover on construction, logistics and the ambitious plans for these Games to leave a lasting legacy
IN A little under two years, the Olympic flame will be lit in a stadium that is now all but finished on a site in east London that is looking more and more as it will on July 27th, 2012. This time next year, test events will begin. All of a sudden, there is not much time left.
Despite the worst recession for 70 years, the construction of the venues is on track. “We’re in a remarkably good place,” said the sports and Olympics minister, Hugh Robertson. “As of right now, we are marginally ahead of where we ought to be in construction terms and on budget, which is an extraordinarily good position to be in.”
As confidence grows that the London Olympics will avoid an Athens-style meltdown, attention will turn to the operational issues for which the London organising committee (Locog), chaired by Lord Sebastian Coe, is responsible.
The venues are merely the canvas onto which the Games will be projected. The success or otherwise of ticketing schemes, upgrades to London’s transport infrastructure and – perhaps most importantly – efforts to ensure the atmosphere of the occasion pervades the capital and the country will determine whether the London Olympic Games are great rather than good.
Seemingly disparate discussions over the opening and closing ceremonies, plans for the “wrap” that will encircle the stadium, the route of the torch relay and the marketing campaigns that will sell unfamiliar sports to the British public will all take on increased significance.
“The emphasis of the whole project is switching from a construction-based project to an operational project,” said Robertson. “Whereas all the attention has been on the budget and the construction, now you are looking at a project that is moving so that the challenges are operational, security and legacy based.”
Once the budget was finally set at €11.2 billion, including more than €2.4 billion in contingency funding, it was always unlikely to be breached. Nevertheless, praise heaped on the Olympic Delivery Authority as it closes in on completion of the venues is justified. Attention will now turn to what happens inside and around them in two years’ time.
STADIUM: A stadium that was once criticised for lacking the ambition or grandeur of a Wembley or a Bird’s Nest has begun to look like a fitting symbol for a sleek, stripped down Games that will project attention on the human face of the competitors and crowd.
The “inside out” design, with many of the amenities to be housed in pods surrounding the stadium, lends it a minimalist, functional look. The external structure is all but finished, with the black and white frame and triangular floodlights that are held in place by slivers of wire dominating the east London skyline.
Turf will be laid by the end of the year and the running track installed next summer. The seats have started going in and the 700 internal rooms that will end up as drug testing facilities, warm-up tracks and holding areas are being finished off.
Coming in at €622 million, it still seems expensive for a structure that could yet end up being reduced to a 25,000-capacity athletics stadium after the Games, even if that prospect seems increasingly remote.
However, standing in the back row of a bowl that will seat 80,000 it is possible for the first time to appreciate the claims made for the intimacy, arresting simplicity and impressive sight lines of the design.
OTHER VENUES: Robertson believes that emphasis on functionality over extravagant form has been translated to the rest of the park. “Looking back now, it is arguable that you could have a cheaper swimming pool - but that is about it,” he says. “There is nothing else on that park that is extravagantly put up.” That places much pressure on the Zaha Hadid-designed aquatics centre, the budget for which has spiralled to €310 million, as the signature building that spectators will see when they enter the park.
The ODA chief executive, David Higgins, is also hopeful the undulations and landscaping of the park as a whole, starting to take shape as thousands of plants take root, will be the defining motif rather than any one particular venue.
He believes the unobtrusive velodrome will be the “unsung hero” of the Games and the fabric cube of the temporary basketball venue, which will also house the handball finals, will prove a notable landmark once lit. The likely final outlay, once additional costs for maintaining the venues and the park until the opening ceremony are added to the total, will be around €8.9 billion. In some respects, the recession has actually aided the ODA, helping it to drive down costs and providing a Keynesian rationale for the project.
In Greenwich, a long-running battle against local campaigners ended in March with a planning decision in Locog’s favour to enable it to hold the equestrian events in the royal park. The last remaining question mark over which sports would be where was removed when Locog was able to persuade badminton and rhythmic gymnastics to move around the North Circular to Wembley Arena, thus enabling a proposed €50 million temporary venue in Greenwich to be scrapped and appease the London mayor Boris Johnson’s desire for fresh savings. The shooting venue at the Royal Artillery Barracks in Woolwich, a source of some controversy for those in the sport who claim it will leave no lasting legacy, will be among the last to be completed.
VILLAGE: Asked last month what had changed most since his last visit, the International Olympic Committee president, Jacques Rogge, was unequivocal in naming the speed with which the village has risen out of the ground. The biggest call the ODA has had to make was its decision to abandon attempts to fund the village, which will house 17,000 athletes during the Games and become 2,800 apartments afterwards, from the private sector. The €840 million cost of building the village is now being borne entirely by the public purse, although the ODA is likely to return to the market in the next few months.
From this time next year, potential buyers will be able to put down a deposit to move into properties in March 2014. The arguments about whether the village provides the ideal mix of private and housing association accommodation will go on, as will the scrutiny from those who believe the opportunity to regenerate the area could have been better realised. But in making the brave decision to pull the plug on private investment, the ODA looks to have made the right call, and boosted chances of a viable legacy.
SECURITY: Baroness Pauline Neville-Jones, the British minister of state for security, is conducting a review of the security budget but it will not be cut. Security has a ringfenced budget of €723 million, plus a contingency of €287 million. In practice, it is tacitly acknowledged that there are further funds available from the national anti-terror budget if required.
Security has long been an area of some concern, owing to the delay in putting together a properly costed cross-departmental plan and fears that there was no clear oversight. However, there is now a renewed confidence that the Home Office-led operation will deliver. A key issue – as at any major sporting event but particularly so here given the emphasis placed on it by the organisers – will be balancing the need for keen vigilance and stringent security with the desire to create an inclusive and buoyant atmosphere.
TRANSPORT: It is a bald truth that all the planning and creative thinking applied to the Olympics could be undone at a stroke if trains fail to run on time. “It’s the biggest risk,” said Higgins starkly. “We know where it hasn’t happened. There are famous Games where it hasn’t happened. The thing is it involves a lot of different players. You’ve got to get the train-operating companies, Network Rail, Transport for London, the local boroughs, and the police all to work together. You can’t have some kind of all-powerful tsar because they all have a day job. You have to build a consensus.”
By bundling in the transport costs to the overall budgets, it is unlikely any of the infrastructure improvements will be derailed by spending cuts. Many of the improvements, including the Javelin train that will link St Pancras to Stratford in seven minutes, are complete or close to being so. The ODA will this week publish the latest version of its transport plan, revealing for the first time the locations of the controversial Olympic route network lanes that will transport competitors, officials and the media around the capital.
TICKETS: For all the confidence of Coe and the Locog chief executive, Paul Deighton, that the committee’s €2.4 billion budget will be successfully balanced, the task will be far from easy. While it is likely that the lowest ticket price will be set eye-catchingly low, there will be intense scrutiny on the number of tickets available in different price categories and how accessible the most popular events are. Locog has to weigh the need to balance its budget against its pledge to make tickets as widely available as possible and avoid the empty seats that plagued Beijing and the World Cup in South Africa.
It is, perhaps, the most important single calculation that Deighton and his team will make. All the rhetoric to date – from a “fans in front” policy that will put the biggest enthusiasts in the most visible seats to plans for shorter sessions and attempts to head off over-supply to sponsors – has served to increase hopes they will get it right. The schedule is due to be finalised in the coming weeks, ahead of a pricing announcement in the autumn and tickets going on sale in spring next year.
ATMOSPHERE: We are starting to get a sense of how the Olympics will look, but it is how they will feel that will increasingly obsess Locog. How are the Games are going to be branded, how the park will be “dressed” and – crucially – how will they create an atmosphere of celebration during the 52 days from the Olympic opening ceremony to the Paralympic closing ceremony? The early completion of the venues will enable Locog to start building and overlaying the “Games time” facilities in the Park.
“The plates are all falling in the right place at the right time. One organisation isn’t sitting there twiddling its thumbs waiting for another to finish,” said Coe. “This is the great advantage of having the guys who are delivering it and the guys organising it within one corridor of each other.” Within the park, plans to sell thousands of so-called “non-event tickets” that will allow holders to watch on Henman Hill-style screens and sample the atmosphere are well advanced.
Just as crucial will be the contributions of the Cultural Olympiad team, sponsors and broadcasters to creating public spaces that will both link the east London site to the rest of the capital and the country, and give a festival feel to a sometimes cynical city. Coe says this is the point at which the public should start to define their own Games, it will be interesting to see the extent to which Locog is willing to let go of the reins and allow them to do so.
LEGACY: This time last year, there was confidence that the appointment of Baroness Margaret Ford as chair of the Olympic Park Legacy Company would mark a sea-change in planning for the regeneration of the east London site. Reassurance from the new coalition government that they will honour a deal on the transfer of land and debt has provided certainty but there are still unanswered questions over who will pay for what. By next April, the OPLC has promised a verdict on what will happen to the stadium.
West Ham United and Newham Council have made a compelling case for a mixed-use stadium that could become the new heartbeat for a community being created from scratch.
However, AEG’s success in converting the O2 from white elephant to profitable venture makes it an attractive option too. It may yet be that both can be combined. Significant stumbling blocks remain, not least who will pay the substantial costs required to introduce hospitality and other permanent facilities. More troubling for Ford will be the search for permanent tenants for the cavernous media centre.
The so-called “soft legacy” is also a pressing concern. On the one hand, the new British government has made the sports participation legacy a key priority. On the other, it appears to be preparing to drop targets, introduced by the previous administration, towards which Sport England has made only glacial progress. The idea that an Olympics on British soil could inspire a generation of young people to play more sport will be further tested by the looming cuts in spending on facilities by local authorities and the lack of any meaningful progress in raising the profile and standing of coaching as a profession.
Robertson admitted delivering the legacy promised by Coe in his electrifying 2005 speech would be “challenging”. But he said: “We made a pretty straightforward promise to the IOC and the global sports community that we would use 2012 to do something no bidding nation had done before, which was to energise a generation of young people through sport. We have to do our utmost to deliver on that.”
TICKETS for the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games go on sale in 2011, and are only available through official outlets.
Approximately eight million tickets will be available for the Olympic Games, with another two million for the Paralympic Games. Subject to availability, tickets will remain on sale until the start of every event. Each ticket will include free travel on public transport in London for the day of the event.
Fans can register for tickets through the website, www.london2012.com. There will also be free events, including road cycling, triathlon and the marathon.
