Olympics: London takes the baton for more modest 2012 Games

Monday 25 August 2008

LONDON - London will take the baton from Beijing on Sunday with the 2012 organisers promising the first 'sustainable' Olympics and Britain riding the wave of its best medal haul for a century.

The 19 golds won mainly by Britain's cyclists, sailors and swimmers in Beijing shows that a programme of heavy investment has already put its competitors on track for glory in four years' time.

And when David Beckham kicks footballs from the top of a red London double-decker bus in Sunday's closing ceremony, the British capital will seek to show it will adopt a vastly different organisational approach from Beijing.

With half of Beijing's estimated 45-billion-dollar (30.5-billion-euro) budget, London's chiefs stress that they have no intention of competing with the Chinese capital to stage a bigger and better Olympics.

Instead, the London Games will seek to regenerate a deprived eastern area of the city and leave a lasting legacy for the local community which will endure long after the memories of sporting glory have faded.

Sebastian Coe, the double Olympic champion who heads the London organising committee, said Beijing may be the last Olympics of its kind.

"It's unlikely that we will see another Olympics of this scope and stature again," Coe said in Beijing.

"The International Olympic Committee themselves recognise that this is the last edition of a Games which is going to look and feel like this."

The iconic 90,000-seater Bird's Nest in Beijing is arguably the most memorable stadium in Olympic history, but the plans for the main stadium in London are far more modest.

The 85,000-capacity venue, with a design that is unremarkable by modern standards, will be converted into a 25,000-capacity stadium after the Games.

"The stadium will be a very different concept (to Beijing)," Coe said.

"We're talking about leaving a 25,000-seater all-purpose stadium."

It was London's plans to transform the rundown Lea Valley area in the east of the city which helped it win a surprise victory over long-time frontrunner Paris in 2005.

Organisers say all the venues have been designed with long-term use in mind in an attempt to avoid the 'white elephant' syndrome which has afflicted so many Olympic cities, most recently the 2004 hosts Athens where most stadia now lie disused and decaying.

When the London Olympics end, the Olympic Park will be transformed into what the organisers say will be "the largest urban park created in Europe for more than 150 years".

The Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, said the long-term benefits of the 2012 Games would be enormous.

"A huge amount of our investment in the Olympic Park is for legacy. We are cleaning up the land, burying overhead power lines, upgrading roads and railways and installing new energy infrastructure.

"A site of this scale and quality, within a few minutes of a great city centre, must be almost unprecedented," he said.

Some dark clouds are already gathering. The original budget for 2012 has already leaped from 3.4 billion pounds to 9.3 billion pounds (11.7 billion euros, 17.2 billion dollars).

Johnson has dismissed reports that the security bill alone will top one billion pounds, although the need for tight security was hammered home on July 7, 2005, the day after London won the vote to host the 2012 Games, when four Islamist extremist suicide bombers killed 52 people on trains and a bus in the capital.

At least the 2012 organisers can be confident that British competitors will not slump in front of an expectant home crowd.

In Beijing, the British team has reaped the benefits of 265 million pounds of funding for elite sport over the past four years to achieve its highest medal tally since 1908.

More funding is promised, and the majority of the competitors, such as 19-year-old double gold medal-winning swimmer Rebecca Adlington, are young enough to be already targeting more success in 2012.