The 2012 London Olympics opens in two years’ time but while the construction of stadiums is on track, the massive project faces a financial squeeze as Britain’s austerity measures bite.
The world’s finest athletes will do battle from July 27, 2012, in a once-depressed area of east London which has been transformed by a vast program of stadium-building and urban regeneration.
The venues may be less spectacular than at the 2008 Beijing Olympics, but the organizers of the Games in London intend to leave a legacy of improved housing and urban infrastructure rarely created by a sports event.
Sebastian Coe, the former Olympic champion credited with helping to win the Games for London and very much their public face, is treating the daunting 24 months ahead in the same way as he approached his medal-laden athletics career.
Coe, the chairman of the London Organising Committee (LOCOG), likened the project’s progress to being at the 600m point of an 800m race, the event in which he held the world record for 16 years.
“We are just entering the back straight on the second lap and of course the killing zone in an 800m is between 500 and 600m. That is the platform that you build for what happens in the finishing straight. This is where a lot of what you do in the finishing straight and what it looks like when you get across the line is shaped. This year is a very important one for us,” he said in an interview.
The main Olympic Stadium and its distinctive white crossed-girder design is fast taking shape and the 80,000 seats are being fitted, while the extraordinary Aquatics Center, its roof resembling a stingray, is impressive.
Coe notes with pride that construction of many of the Olympic venues will be completed this time next year.
However, he cautions that “people run away with the idea that complete means finished. We have to do the testing that is absolutely crucial in terms of making sure that it works.”
Construction is currently well within the Olympics’ budget of £9.3 billion (US$14.2 billion), but the figure includes £1.2 billion of a contingency fund — designed to meet any unforeseen problems — which has yet to be used.
The new British government under Prime Minister David Cameron has embarked on a program of deep cuts as it seeks to reduce the country’s biggest deficit since WWII.
The government has warned that the Olympics cannot remain immune to the belt-tightening.
“The Olympics is happening against the backdrop of the largest peacetime budget deficit this country ever had so you can argue that the Olympics has to play its part in paying off the national debt,” Sport and Olympics Minister Hugh Robertson said.
Coe — formerly a lawmaker in Cameron’s Conservative Party — treads carefully, saying only that the prime minister and Robertson have said “that the delivery of a memorable Games that makes us all proud is high on their list of priorities.”
The Olympics, he says, is a “discretionary spend, the most vulnerable spend that you can have when the economy is struggling.”
“We wake up every morning trying to figure out how we can deliver this in a more cost-effective way, but in a way that makes everybody proud to be part of the Games,” he said.
One area in which Coe is determined to improve on Beijing is in filling stadiums for every event — empty seats blighted some of the sports in China.
Paul Deighton, the former Goldman Sachs banker who is LOCOG chief executive, has pledged that 75 percent of tickets will go on sale to the general public, not VIPs or corporate interests.
“We have probably spent more time understanding the landscape of ticket sales than any other organizing committee,” Coe said.
“We will deliver a memorable Games,” he added. “This is a project of national enormity, it’s not coming around again in our lifetime. I get more excited every day the Games get closer. I’m a competitor, so bring it on.”
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