Filed under: London Olympics 2012
I welcome the proposed Arcelor Mittal Tower in the Olympic Park, which the Mayor announced to the world yesterday, and feel it will be a great draw during and after the Games themselves in 2012. However, while issues of the cost and planning were dealt with at the launch’s question and answer session yesterday, l went away not quite sure who will end up owning the Tower.
If the number of Chinese visitors to the Bird’s Nest in Beijing is anything to go by, then we can expect thousands of people daily visiting the Mittal Tower, drawn by the prospect of seeing the Olympic Park and beyond from its vantage point at the top. l am sure an attraction like this, priced in the right way, will generate a more than steady income to cover the management and maintenance costs. As it appears that most of the cost of erecting the tower will be underwritten by Mr Mittal’s generosity, we won’t have huge loans to service.
Mr Mittal will get his tower and name in the London skyline for perpetuity. So hopefully he will agree to hand ownership over to a body that will use the income from the tower to subsidise other activities and events on the Olympic site that aren’t necessarily going to attract quite so many visitors and ensure that they are kept going long after the Olympic Games bandwagon has left town.
April 1, 2010
Yesterday we had the Olympic officials in front of the London Assembly to update us on progress towards the 2012 Olympic Games. Brian Coleman and myself took the opportunity to put it to representatives of the Olympic Delivery Authority that salaries and bonuses for senior management at the ODA were excessive, particularly at a time of major cutbacks in the public sector. I accused them of being the “bankers of the Olympics“, spending taxpayers’ money on generous bonuses for themselves while others are having to live with the consequences of the recession.
An examination of the ODA’s accounts for 2008-9 (pdf here pp.76-7) reveals that its chief executive earned a basic salary of £384,000 and its chairman £250,000 (for a three-day week), while salaries for the ODA’s seven directors were between £192,000 and £282,000. (This compares with the prime minster’s annual salary of £195,000.) In addition the chief executive received a bonus of £209,566, while the directors got between £38,000 and £48,000 each. Total bonuses came to £2.1 million, up from £1.7 million the previous year, out of a total wage bill of £19 million for 202 staff.
Now l have been supportive of holding the 2012 Olympics in London right from the beginning, but clearly some people are doing very well for themselves out of it. In tough times for all of us, they need to show more restraint.
October 22, 2009
Today at the launch of Client Earth outside City Hall, I expressed concern that London’s hosting of the 2012 Olympics may have been undermined by Boris Johnson’s regressive environmental decisions.
The International Olympic Committee’s evaluation of London’s bid (pdf here) expressed concern about London’s “increasing levels of ozone pollution” but said that “legislation and actions now in place, such as the ‘low emission zone’ and ‘congestion charge’, are aimed at correcting that trend and ensuring all air pollutants are within World Health Organisation and EU target levels by 2010″.
Since this evaluation was made, Boris Johnson has been elected Mayor, and London’s measures to tackle its poor air quality and ozone pollution have been rolled back. The Congestion Charge Zone will be halved in size and the third phase of the Low Emission Zone, which was due to prevent the most polluting vehicles from entering Greater London, has been indefinitely suspended.
A recent London Assembly report into the city’s air quality, Every Breath You Take (pdf here), found that it could be responsible for up to 3,500 premature deaths and 12,000 children being hospitalised for respiratory failure. It has been reported that the Government is considering countermanding the Mayor because his actions may have undermined their fight against a possible fine of £300 million for failure to meet EU standards on air quality.
It’s bad enough that over three thousand Londoners have their lives cut short each year because of the state of our air. The last thing we want is for this still to be an issue when the world comes here in three years time – as it was in Beijing and Athens. If the Mayor continues down this road, that sadly could well be the case. At the least, the Mayor should now reverse his short-sighted decision to cancel the next phase of the Low Emission Zone.
July 27, 2009
Last Sunday, on a glorious evening at Lords, with its new floodlights and its immediate neighbourhood brought alive in manner that is not customary in St John’s Wood, we saw the successful conclusion of the ICC Twenty20 cricket World Cup, with Pakistan beating the Sri Lankans. Half of the tournament had been staged in London, with matches divided between the Oval and Lords, and it was fitting that it should close at the ground where it had opened less than three weeks earlier, with the unexpected victory of Holland over England in a dramatic final over.
That opening match boded well for the events that would unfold over the next few weeks. The tournament featured fielding and catching that was routinely breathtaking; umpires who got most things right; the example of Ireland giving encouragement to amateur cricketers all around the world; and England’s victory in the parallel women’s tournament. Completed in less than 18 days, the competition left the fans wanting more.
Quality was the key, and we saw the return of traditional skills like wicket keeping and spin bowling in all its variations, as teams realised that the biff-bang approach doesn’t always work. And London showed what an excellent sporting venue it is, with fans of every nation embracing and enjoying Twenty20 – rather more so than some of the more conservative MCC members, it must be said.
London is the historic home of cricket, and the “spirit of the game” now enshrined in the official rules by the MCC embodies the Olympic ideal of fair play. So hosting the Olympic Games in 2012 can provide the capital with an ideal opportunity to showcase cricket, allowing it to reach a much wider global audience, while in return increasing the appeal of the Olympics amongst cricketing nations that don’t engage as fully with traditional athletics.
Leading cricketers such as Gilchrist, Waugh, Dravid and others have been promoting the inclusion of Twenty20 cricket as a “full” Olympic sport in the 2020 Olympics, under the catchy slogan “Twenty20 for 2020”. As a prelude to that it would be useful if cricket were part of the Games in London 2012 in some form.
In the past, the host Olympic nation has introduced a “demonstration” sport as part of the Games, with the aim that this should become an official Olympic sport in future years. This changed with the removal of demonstration sports at the Beijing Olympics, so host cities are now showcasing local sports as part of the “Cultural Olympiad”.
During the Beijing Olympics “Wushu”, an exhibition and full contact sport derived from traditional Chinese martial arts, was incorporated into the Cultural Olympiad. So if the Chinese can have Wushu, l can’t see why we shouldn’t have cricket in its Twenty20 version incorporated into the London Olympics, given that it is our summer cultural game.
Cricket has been part of the Games in the past – it was last played at the 1900 Olympics, when Great Britain beat France. So with a successful Twenty20 World Cup concluded last Sunday, isn’t it time to think about having cricket returning to the Olympics for 2012?
First published in West End Extra, 26 June 2009
June 27, 2009
The spectacular Beijing Games of the 29th Olympiad, which l attended as a private spectator, were an enthralling sporting festival. Over 16 days we saw such dramas unfold in the Bird’s Nest stadium as the performance of the fastest man in the world, Usain Bolt of Jamaica. In the Water Cube pool we had similar outstanding performances by the US swimmer Michael Phelps with his personal haul of 8 golds, meriting a separate entry in the medals table on his own! This while the Chinese lost their “pin-up” boy Lin Xiang who pulled out of the 110 metres hurdles – the only real shock the hosts suffered as they emerged as a sporting superpower at these games. Let’s also not forget the huge success of Team GB coming fourth in the medals table.
So, in short, the Beijing Games will be remembered in years to come for the amazing sporting event that it was, as 43 world records and 120 Olympic records were shattered, rather than for the fireworks and theatricals. This is the first lesson amongst others to be drawn from the Beijing Games for when we host the next Games in 2012. Other lessons we need to learn from Beijing for London 2012 include managing the “IOC lanes” on the roads (reserved for International Olympic Committee officials and key sponsors of the games); air pollution measures; ticketing and touting; and the need to be hospitable to visitors.
As l moved between the various Olympic venues, Beijing seemed awash with Olympic lanes for the IOC officials and sponsors. Beijing has far more four-lane roads to meet such requirements than London, even though for most of the time the IOC lanes appeared empty. Here in London we will struggle to accommodate such lanes on our roads, particularly where we already have bus lanes. Thus it may be worth considering our bus lanes doubling up as IOC lanes, particularly in light of how little those in Beijing were actually used by officials and sponsors.
We should not forget that the major environmental issue of the Games was air quality, as it was in Athens in 2004, and in both cases it was suggested that the pollution would affect the performance of top athletes. The Beijing city authorities improved air quality by providing better and cheaper public transport, and by implementing the odd-even license plate restrictions that allowed the city’s private car owners to drive only on alternate days, as well as quite literally closing down the factories outside the city boundaries before and during the Games. Clearly the air pollution did not affect the athletes, as World and Olympic records were shattered, from the sprints to the marathon. And interestingly Beijing’s residents are demanding the continuation of such initiatives as the license plate system, so this truly becomes part of the environmental legacy of the Games. While London does not face the problem of air pollution to the same degree, it will nevertheless be a challenge to meet the EU requirements for air quality by 2010 and we should be mindful of how any slippage in achieving these targets may impact on our public image in relation to the 2012 Games, as air quality has clearly been established as the critical green issue over the past few Olympics.
Ticketing in Beijing clearly favoured foreigners, as the prices were pitched for local audiences yet were more readily available for those of us from abroad. Moreover, in the early stages of most events we did see many empty seats. This is not surprising as the level of interest in events clearly increases dramatically as we get beyond the qualification stage to the quarter-finals onwards. Some blame should be apportioned to sponsors not taking up their allotments of tickets; indeed it would have better if they had been given away instead. But we should be aware that selling tickets for 2012 at London prices will result in a great deal of demand amongst Londoners while making them unduly expensive for many foreign tourists, quite the converse to Beijing. In this respect some of our clubs have extensive experience of ticketing issues like pricing and distribution and we should get their advice and assistance. For example, it is no accident that Old Trafford, as one of the cheaper grounds in the Premier and with an extensive marketing operation, can sell 75,000-odd tickets every other week during the season.
As for the problem of ticket touts, interestingly the worst touts in Beijing were all foreigners who seemed to have an abundance of tickets, so not surprisingly when the authorities arrested and deported them this went down well with both locals and tourists.
And finally, now that we have taken the baton, we should acknowledge how well Beijing hosted the games. Londoners, like Parisians and New Yorkers, have a reputation for being short-tempered with visitors, particularly those of us like myself who live in Central London. Beijing, however, excelled in welcoming foreigners. It was as if the whole city treated us all like house guests, with most foreigners having tales of Beijingers reaching out to them with kind gestures. Furthermore, we probably won’t be able to provide anything like the huge army of helpful, smiling volunteers. But what London can offer instead is a mixing pot of variety. From the noblest arts to modern street culture, London has it in bags, along with a sense of humour and a great sense of occasion. Despite the difficult job London faces, nothing will stop me being in London for the 2012 Games.
September 9, 2008