POSTED: November 22nd 2010

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JOHN GOODBODY: London should be wary of tracking back on 2012 stadium

THE JOHN GOODBODY COLUMN / An authoritative and exclusive series from Sports Features Communications

LONDON, Nov 23: Some observers can scarcely believe it. London’s preparations for the 2012 Olympics are going so smoothly that the hesitations expressed before the city got the Games in 2005 now seem unnecessarily cautious.

The fear then was not that Britain cannot stage major sports events as Wimbledon, the London Marathon and a huge professional football programme regularly show to the contrary. It was rather that after the fiasco of Wembley, building the venues, with its associated myriad of problems, might also run into difficulties.

Publicly, the International Olympic Committee has more than commended London for its preparations. After last week’s seventh IOC Coordination Commission visit ended , its chairman, Denis Oswald, announced that “preparations are advancing at an astonishing rate” saying that everyone involved  “should be congratulated for the high quality of the work they are producing across this complex project.”

Privately, and more significantly, members are delighted with the progress, finding it refreshingly easy to deal with London, after some of the worries, particularly with Athens, that they have had had in the past.

Sponsorship is close to exceeding the target of £700 million. The number of volunteers has also been over-subscribed and the British media, after resentment at the early hike in the cost of the project, has written little that has been derogatory. In fact, it has hardly written anything at all. Good news is no news, as journalists often say.

So what are the problems that might occur ? Some IOC members are concerned about the road transport to the Olympic Park in the east of the city and whether the Olympic family-only traffic lanes will work in the city’s notoriously narrow streets and how much bad feeling those lanes will engender with the local population.

The rail transport certainly seems fine, given the wide variety of ways in which people can reach the Olympic Park.

Traffic concern

However, anyone who has experienced London’s traffic, even given the fact that many residents will be on holiday at the time of the Games, must have reservations about travelling by road. This will anyway be discouraged for spectators, not least because there will be few parking spaces.

The unknown problem is the extent of the terrorism threat; the known problem is the future of the Olympic Stadium.

One reason that London got the Games in 2005 was that it would be forced to build an athletics stadium, capable of hosting an event such as the world championships, first held in 1983 and never staged in Britain, or the European Championships, which also has never taken place in Britain despite being on the calendar since 1934.

Several IOC members, with athletics affiliations, voted for London, rather than Paris which already has the Stade de France, because of this factor.

The two contending bidders for post-Games use are  principally, two Premier League clubs, the local one of West Ham, who have agreed to keep the track, and  Tottenham Hotspur, who would rip it up.

Sergey Bubka, an IOC member and senior vice-president of the International Association of Athletic Federations (IAAF), has rekindled the debate by saying that it was “a gentleman’s agreement” to retain the track: “It means when we say something, we shake the hand and we deal.”

Even given the fact that Bubka may well be wanting to embarrass Sebastian Coe, his rival to succed Lamine Diack as IAAF president, there is no doubt that many IOC members would be very sore if the track did not remain.

** JOHN GOODBODY covered the 2008 Olympics for The Sunday Times, his 11th successive Summer Games and is the author of the audio book A History of the Olympics, read by Barry Davies, the BBC commentator. He was Sports News Correspondent of The Times 1986-2007, for whom he received journalistic awards in all three decades on the paper, including Sports Reporter of The Year in 2001

Keywords · Goodbody · Bubka · IAAF · Diack · Coe

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