# London Dopers, are you helping to get London ready for the Olympics? **URL:** \ **Category:** Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share\ **Created:** [March 21, 2012, 3:00am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/london-dopers-are-you-helping-to-get-london-ready-for-the-olympics/616371 "2012-03-21T03:00:05Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 2\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![SciFiSam](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/47e85d/32.png) [@SciFiSam](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SciFiSam)\ **Post date:** [March 26, 2012, 6:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/london-dopers-are-you-helping-to-get-london-ready-for-the-olympics/616371/21 "2012-03-26T18:48:40Z")
> [@The\_Great\_Cornholio](#): > > It’s the fact that it’s so tightly controlled that pisses me off the most. If Boris, Coe and all of them wanted to put on their own little shindig, tapped up Londoners for the money to do it, hey, fair enough. They could keep it all to themselves, it would be _their_ little party. However, as a whole, we’re pitching in for something which is _their_ little party. > > If we’re all paying, we should all be benefitting as much as possible. In other words, open season on the apparent multitude of tourists who are coming here for the Games (as opposed to the multitude of athletes and their crew who will be here). You see, call me a cynic, but I doubt there will be a flood of tourists spilling out from London during this beano, I’m of the opinion it is a huge White Elephant. > How many people here actually give a toss about athletics? No-one I know, those that did apply for tickets just want to go because they’ve been assaulted by publicity campaigns to convice them it will be the event of a lifetime. Not so, I say, a running race is a running race, there won’t be much difference between these and any other running race you see on telly really, unless you are some kind of athletics nerd. Someone might shave a tenth of a second off a world record, but there’s practically zero chance of anyone saying “Did you see _that_? Were you there?” I feel sure I won’t cum in my pants at any “spectacle” the Games produce. (We’ll discount any of the things that I dream of happening in the Women’s Beach Volleyball, they simply cannot occur, no matter how much I pray) > > I realise that the organisers are going to be doing their utmost to whip up a frenzy in the lead-up to the Games, but I think the public might feel short-changed afterwards. > > Maybe I’m wrong, but I think the money might have been better spent on promoting the UK as a whole in this, our Queen’s Diamond Jubilee, with the express purpose of bringing lots of foreign tourists to every corner of the land, so we can fleece them and give the economy a boost. > It’s a lot of money to spunk on something with such a limited scope and time, something which seems to cater more for Seb Coe’s London-centric ego, rather than a UK which isn’t exactly flush with cash right now. > Maybe London will buck the trend and the money spent on Olympic venues won’t prove to be a waste of time once the Olympic circus rolls out to its next stop. Maybe the urban decay seen in almost every other Olympic city that has hosted won’t be seen here afterwards. Maybe. Anyone fancy a wager? > Oh, and I feel guilty now SciFiSam, I forgot “normal” people live there and will have to put up with all this shite! Is it partly that the Olympics always seems to be based on a city rather than a country? Otherwise I don’t see any reason why some of the events couldn’t be staged in, say, Manchester or Birmingham, which both have pretty good transport links to London as well as the rest of the world, especially when some of the stadia have to be built especially for the Olympics. But Londoners are paying more than the rest of the country, at least. In theory we’ll get more from tourism and so on - indirectly, at least - so that seems fair. And I guess, if (big if) there’s more tourism in London then a lot of the money from that doesn’t actually stay in London - it’s either invested wherever the moneymakers want it to go or, with taxes, goes into national coffers. At least most of the development in London has been in the poorest areas. Hackney Wick really was very run-down before the games - it’d be pretty hard for it to be an example of urban decay afterwards compared to how it was before. ---
**Author:** ![Mk\_VII](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/5f9b8f/32.png) [@Mk\_VII](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mk_VII)\ **Post date:** [March 26, 2012, 9:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/london-dopers-are-you-helping-to-get-london-ready-for-the-olympics/616371/22 "2012-03-26T21:00:12Z")
The Olympics is being a right bloody pain. Roadworks on the Core Olympic Roads banned from 1st March, Venue-specific roads and alternate roads from 1st July-9th Sept. Once it’s finally over you can expect an orgy of long-postponed road-digging-up. I’d tell the whole Olympic movement to bugger off. How I’m going to get to work once it’s on I don’t know. The ‘legacy’ will be a host of hugely underused facilities with grass growing in them, like Sydney and Athens. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/london-dopers-are-you-helping-to-get-london-ready-for-the-olympics/616371.md?page=1)