As someone living in London there seem to have been two crucial shifts. The more obvious was the inspection visits earlier this year. It was obvious at the time that London had done very well and there was really no moment thereafter that Paris dented its momentum. Madrid was still the wildcard in the race - and there was that one blip in the voting - but New York and Moscow were just making up the card. The fact it had turned into a very close inter-western-European chase makes me particularly reluctant to read anything about global politics into the result.
However the factor that nobody seems to have noticed was Athens. The Parisian approach of emphasising that all the infrastructure was already in place made sense when the doubts lingered over the 2004 games. But with that resolved and Beijing inevitably going to be a grand affair, the IOC was likely to be temptable by a grander vision for 2012. And the London bid did have that.
I live in London and I wanted Paris to win the vote because I thought this was the optimum result for us. If Paris had won, we wouldn’t have had to pay for the Games, but anyone here who wanted to attend could easily hop across the channel (it’s dead easy to get to Paris), watch whatever they wanted to see of the Games and have a holiday in France / go to Eurodisney / stock up with a booze cruise and so on.
But we won…
Well, in a simple patriotic sense I suppose one can feel pleased at the outcome, and particularly since it’s perceived (or presented by the media) as a victory over the French. This sentiment plays well at the moment because we don’t like the French attitude over the EU and the CAP, and we really didn’t like Chirac’s recent sarky comments about our food.
But, setting aside blind patriotism, I do think this is going to be a nightmare for Londoners. First, this is already a hellishly expensive city to live in, and it’s going to get a lot more expensive in the run up to 2012. Secondly, I honestly don’t buy the re-assurances the ‘experts’ have repeatedly given about traffic congestion and gridlock. Unless you actually live and work here, it’s hard to appreciate just how appallingly bad traffic gridlock can be in this city, and I think things will get worse thanks to the Olympics, not better. Thirdly, we Brits can sometimes handle large-scale public construction projects, and we do have plenty of talent in terms of design, engineering and construction. Nonetheless, we are also very good at messing these projects up and seeing them sink into a quagmire of political in-fighting and escalating costs. I bet that the construction nightmares will start soon and not end until way after the Games.
Massively-wose traffic? Not likely. To start with, very few visitors will be driving. And does the capital grind to a halt when there’s a match at Twickenham, or when Arsenal, West Ham and Chelsea are playing at home? Hardly. There’s going to be massive capacity on the transport to Stratford, and everything else is dispersed fairly evenly across the city.
To follow on from GorillaMan, it’s exactly the example of the Channel Tunnel Raillink - which is what you’d be using to see a 2012 Paris Olympics - that makes the bid seem achievable.
I suspect that Stratford is already the single biggest building site in the history of the city.
Paris’ bid was rooted in the argument that they already had everything in place. Sure, the stadium is already not-new. But everything’s 100% solidly ready-to-go.
Two years ago, with Athens looking very worrying in just about every way, the Parisian approach was a winner. However, Athens managed to shine through in the end, which made the ‘certainty’ angle of Paris’ bid less important.
And while Brits love to complain about projects that don’t go to plan, I’m going to carry on harping on about the Manchester Commonwealth Games. The IOC will have paid good attention to these games - after all, it was essentially a scaled-down version of the bid for the 2000 Olympics. And it was a fantastic success, however you measure it.
Obviously those are the sentiments of 2 NY’ers who didn’t crunch the numbers and realize they could’ve sublet their apartments to out-of-towners, taken the proceeds and spend 2 weeks on the French Riviera.
London 2012: It gives a 3rd, whole new meaning to the term water sports.