Olympics: Playing leapfrog

The inspectors came to London last week, and leave today with encouraging news for the England bid. Nawal El Moutawakel, the impressive chairman of the IOC Evaluation Commission said she had been delighted to hear the Queen give her personal support, and added that the commission is convinced there was commitment to the bid from all political parties. The remit of the commission is to check whether the promises and claims regarding infrastructure, public support and capability are as written in the brochure. It had become almost a treasonable offence to question in print whether newspapers here should be no more than cheer leaders. Yet to many of us, the £30m being spent on impressing the IOC and the estimated £11 billion it will take to bring London up to scratch demands scrutiny. It remains shocking that the main selling point of London’s rhetoric is that the East End’s former docklands have become such a derelict, deprived and neglected area of our capital that it needs the grace and favour of the Olympics to transform and regenerate it.

“You have only to look at Athens to see the transformational power the Olympic Games has on a city,” became the mantra of Tessa Jowell, the secretary of state for culture, media and sport as she led the IOC Evaluation Commission around. Welcome aboard, minister, to the sport for good bandwagon.

We must not mock London, or the remarkable transformation in the bid in the past nine months. It was evidently the right decision to replace Barbara Cassani, a vigorous American businesswoman, with Lord Seb Coe, a true-blue double Olympian, to lead the bid. Once you are in the race, you have to know all the hands to shake, to display the stamina and determination and single-mindedness of a proven winner.

What Coe has done, he could not have achieved without the breathtaking displays of Britishness in the past two years. The millions who welcomed England’s rugby World Cup winners back home, the crowds who filled London’s streets when the Olympic medallists returned from Athens, the uplifting atmosphere sustained throughout the Commonwealth Games in Manchester, all got beneath the skins of some previously indifferent leaders of government and the establishment.

“The cabinet were sceptics,” admits Jowell of the initial response to backing the Olympic bid. “Then they became cautious, and now we are all enthusiasts.” That explains why No 10 became open house to Nawal El Moutawakel and her 12 Evaluations Commissioners appointed by the IOC to visit the five cities. She is a stunning champion, not just of the Olympic hurdles in 1984, but of Muslim women.

It would be foolish to underestimate her, or to think that by putting the team of evaluators on their very own Jubilee Line underground train to ride four stops to Greenwich — or manipulating traffic lights to speed their road journey — you hoodwink them into being blind, deaf and unaware of London’s transport stagnation. At times, the words of politicians have been almost beyond belief. “From being a sick man, transport is now in the front seat, the crown jewel in the bid,” said transport minister Tony McNulty last week. That had to be taken with a pinch of salt by Londoners who, while the commissioners were on their way to Downing Street, and later to Buckingham Palace in time for the sea bass starter, were treated to the old refrain on the Northern Line about delays due to “defective radio systems”.

In fact, we were on our way to Trafalgar Square to see Sir Steve Redgrave and the mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, unveil the athletic statue at the time. But at least that statue, which will stand in the square for two weeks and then move to Canary Wharf in the already reinvigorated commercial part of that area, is open to the people of London.

All week long, we were told IOC members place heavy priority on what the “people” really feel towards the Olympic Games. The fact is that the commissioners were kept well away from the people while they went about their work. Yesterday, at the end of the visit, the commission sat for its final photo call, and El Moutawakel thanked London and said how impressively the bid has grown.

In Madrid, and soon in New York, Paris and Moscow the commissioners praised and will praise the progress of the bidding cities. It is not their right to be judgemental if any city appears to fall below the requirements, that will fall to the IOC executive. However there was a serious portent for Madrid, and a hidden encouragement for London in the answer El Moutawakel gave to the question of racism. “Sport is about friendship,” she said, “about bringing people together, not about hate or animosity. We are against this, and we deny it with our movement.” In the Bernabeau stadium, in Madrid, there have been several racist outbursts from the crowd, not least when England played a friendly there and Ashley Cole and Shaun Wright-Phillips were the subject of monkey chants.

Lest we forget, the need for this Evaluation Commission is because the IOC became so corrupt with members who sold their votes for gifts and lavish hospitality to award Salt Lake City the last Winter Olympics, that the IOC could no longer allow them all to tour the bidding cities, of which there were 13 when the process began. The IOC old guard, under Juan Antonio Samaranch, has purged some members, although he remains honorary life president. The new guard, under the Belgian Jacques Rogge, is installed with new principles.

But, as government and royalty, not just here but around the circles of influence the IOC still enjoys, see public acclaim rise towards our sporting champions, so the IOC wants something in return for giving a city the Games that supposedly will allow it to reap up to £4 billion income in tourism and advertising value over the Olympic cycle. The IOC asks for a “legacy”. London offers the regeneration of boroughs such as Newham and Tower Hamlets and Waltham Forest, large in immigrant population. But tomorrow New York will show the commission its own industrial wasteland. Many cities have used this trick of attracting the Olympic Games, or the European Championship, or the World Cup, by pointing out that a successful bid would lead to the renovation of chronically deprived areas.

We cannot blame our leaders, or the IOC, if this “legacy” comes to mean that facilities which should long ago have been equally distributed around major cities come to bear the imprint of the Olympic rings.

The commissioners have been impressed by London’s zeal and have been shown enough to suggest that the “virtual bid”, as Paris scoffed at London some months ago, has genuine roots, credible planning and financial underpinning. Because of the bidding war, London was shamed into addressing serious fault lines in its infrastructure. Because of the togetherness, from Coe to Livingstone to Cherie Blair, who told journalists that winning the Olympic bid would be “Tony ’s crowning glory — part of his legacy”.

If London has moved at all in the ranking this weekend, it may be from third to second. Madrid will drop down the list as a result of the Eta bombing that came again within days of the commission visit. New York will suffer because it is too soon after the soulless Atlanta Games of 1996. And Moscow is developing a deadly legacy — the murder or disappearance of 10 sporting administrators since the downfall of communism in 1991. Those are crude yardsticks, but they stick in the minds of IOC members forbidden to see for themselves. London appears to be closing on Paris, but our week of euphoria is over, Paris has its to come.

And the athlete in Trafalgar Square? Maybe it is not Kelly Holmes. Maybe it is, as the sculptor says, simply a generic figure of a 2012 middle-distance runner. Anyway, Nelson, conqueror of the French navy at Trafalgar, has his good eye facing in the opposite direction.