Quietly, with a minimum of fuss and barely even a whiff of smugness, something remarkable has happened in Britain. The new Olympic Stadium has been finished, on time and under budget.
Yes, it really has: £486 million is not a small amount of money, but it is well below the £525 million set aside for the project in late 2008. One may be impressed, but one should not be surprised. With hardly any more fanfare, the new Olympic Velodrome was completed in February, also on budget. Who knew this could be the British way?
Our track record on projects of this size is, undeniably, ignoble. Wembley Stadium turned up a year late, and up to £100 million over budget.
It joined a crowded field of ambitious British constructions with eventual costs bearing little relation to their predicted ones, including the Channel Tunnel, the Millennium Dome, the Scottish Parliament and the work in progress that is Crossrail. Only a few years ago, it would have seemed a fairly safe bet that most Olympic projects would join them.
In Greece, construction for the 2004 Olympics became a symbol of an economy spiralling out of control. In Delhi, building work for last year’s Commonwealth Games went right to the wire. For a while, London 2012 looked destined to follow this model. Who could forget the shock of 2006 when construction costs soared by £250 million in a heartbeat, because of the failure of organisers to remember about VAT?
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Today, this all feels like distant history. The stadium and the velodrome are complete, and venues for handball and basketball, as well as the Olympic Village, are soon to join them. Here’s hoping that our athletes are as fast as our builders.