Not much to add to Old Holborn’s missive on the matter.
A complete waste of public money on an anachronistic clusterfuck.
If it was worth doing, it’d be viable as a private venture, like football, or F1, for example.
AJ
UPDATE: Join in the curmudging over at the CoffeeHouse.
If you want to rejuvenate parts of London, just go and rejuvenate them. Even allowing for the grotesque inefficiencies of the public sector, you should be able to build 100,000 units of affordable housing for the cost of hosting the Olympics. They’d be very affordable indeed, because you could give them away and still spend less than is being wasted on the 2012 games.
Al Jahom's Final Word 
Your right of course. Anyway the Olympics should now be held only in emerging markets loaded with US Treasury bonds and hard currency reserves and Arab states that have finally run out of ways to spend their money. When They tried to get New York to hold it, most New Yorkers were less than complimentary about the idea realising that it will just interfere with their day to day lives – London is exactly the same. Of course the real reason it is being held in London is the same reason we ended up with the millennium dome in Greenwich. You can guarantee that all the fat construction contracts were handed out for generous back handers and all the property has already been earmarked for private development after the contaminated land is cleaned up on the tax payers coin of course. Greenwich peninsula, which was so contaminated as to be unsuitable for human habitation had to be sanitised for the dome to be built and it wasn’t more than a month or so before the first waterfront apartments were being constructed.
Not that i particularly care about the olympics, but how does chucking 100000 homes “rejuvinate” an area, as opposed to turning it into a ghetto?
To properly rejuvinate it you need to build places for homes, schools, surgerys and buisness and transport links, just saying.
The olympics could rejuvinate the area, until of course you factor in the fact the goverment are in charge of it, in which case it will be a clusterfuck no matter what they do.
“If it was worth doing, it’d be viable as a private venture, like … F1, for example.”
If only. British taxpayers aren’t being fleeced to fund the British Grand Prix, which is actually pretty fucking surprising given everything else they’re robbed to pay for, sporting vanity projects included. Elsewhere many other F1 Grand Prix races are heavily subsidised by the government. Last I heard the Australian GP cost about A$50 million of taxpayers’ money – per year – courtesy of the state government. There are about 4 million people in Victoria and if I remember right about 130,000 people go to the GP over the whole four days. You don’t even need to bother doing the maths to see that most Victorians are paying for something they don’t actually go to, and even those like me who like the sport and might want to go still have to buy a fucking ticket.
Wethe state government,also gave a couple of million to Tiger Woods’ wife’s lawyer to get the bastard to come and play some golf last year, and because she was really pissed off with him he’s coming back again this year for another couple of million. All because sporting events these days have been hijacked and turned into politicians’ vanity projects.Apparently London only got the Olympics because the Greek delegate to the IOC was so befuddled by being blown by a Singapore lovely that he pressed the voting button at the wrong time. Hence the 2012 logo which, unsubtly, commemorates the event. Thus the most expensive blow-job in history has been paid for by the UK taxpayer.
He’s right about the logo, you know, although it is more reminiscent of the beast with two backs than and act of fellatio.
Now honestly, in which of the above acts of public indecency is the Greek delegate more likely to have participated?