POSTED: January 25th 2011

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NEIL WILSON: Wind of controversy blows up a London storm for great and good

THE NEIL WILSON COLUMN / An exclusive, authoritative series from Sports Features Communications

LONDON, Jan 25: How much is a promise worth? Not much if you are a politician seeking election. But how much to an honourable man or woman?

I ask because a lot of promises will be broken by those who believe themselves honourable if the Olympic Park Legacy Company recommends to the Government that Premier League Tottenham Hotspur take over the Olympic Stadium in London after the Games.

What is a promise worth to Sir Keith Mills, deputy chairman of the London bid committee which promised to maintain an athletics track within the stadium both in writing in its bid book and in speeches before the International Olympic Committee?

Not much it would seem. He is supporting the plans of Tottenham to demolish that stadium after 2012 in his capacity as a non-executive director. How he will look his chairman Lord Coe in the eye across the boardroom table if the decision goes Tottenham’s way is hard to conceive.

But then, how will Coe himself look IOC president Jacques Rogge and his executive board in the eye when they come to London for their next meeting in April? Or Lamine Diack and the other IAAF members who voted for London when Coe next meets them as vice-president of that organisation?

Coe, of course, has done his level best, coming out boldly in favour of the plan by Spurs’ rivals West Ham United to maintain the track in post-Games mode and so honour his promise. He does not have a vote on the matter at the OPLC, so what more could he do?

Nothing now but he could have done so  six years ago when he first became chairman of the bid committee.

This problem is not new. It was created when Coe, Mills, Tessa Jowell, then Olympic minister, and London Mayor Ken Livingstone agreed that the legacy of a track was a good selling point for the bid but did not bother to cost it.

Upward readjustment

Jowell persuaded then tight-fisted Chancellor Gordon Brown to sanction a bid with a set of spurious figures that were probably cobbled together on the back of an envelope.

They bore no resemblance to reality, as was quickly shown by a massive upward readjustment after the bid was won. Certainly they did not include the cost of maintaining an Olympic Stadium in multi-use format beyond the Games.

Why would Jowell have come clean on it? She was having enough difficulty persuading Brown without mentioning that he needed to find another £375 million,, the maintenance cost of an athletics stadium over its probable lifespan. It would have added about 15pc to what Brown was finding a hard enough pill to swallow already.

So it was quietly forgotten until the vote was won. Something will come along, they hoped. And it did. Tottenham Hotspur.

Mills would surely have to resign as deputy chairman of the organising committee. His position would be untenable if the vote were to go to Spurs. But is Coe’s position any more tenable? For all the inspiration he brought to the bid and the perspiration he has shed for the Games’ organisation, he made a promise, in writing and in speeches, which he would have been unable to keep.

The 2012 Games have largely escaped the winds of controversy that swirled around Sydney, Athens and Beijing ahead of their Olympics. Now one is blowing Force 10.

NEIL WILSON reported his first Olympic Games in Munich in 1972. He has since covered another nine summer and nine winter Olympics for various newspapers, including The Independent and the Daily Mail with whom he has worked for the last 19 years as Athletics and Olympic correspondent. He was Britain's Sports Journalist of the Year in 1984 and is the author of seven books  

Keywords · Neil Wilson · London 2012 · Olympic Stadium · Coe · Mills

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