Yes, put the brakes on the Olympic juggernaut

But this one's modestly good news. Yesterday, it emerged that in order to stay within even its new doubled £9.3 billion budget, London 2012 is likely to can the fencing arena and basketball venue.

At last, at last, here is a small sign that the 2012 construction juggernaut does, after all, have brakes. For focusing, as London has, on new
sports buildings — some, like the fencing and basketball arenas, explicitly temporary; others, like the main stadium, with a very doubtful post-
Games future — is the absolutely classic Olympic mistake.

All Olympics are sold to their sucker host cities as delivering huge non-sporting benefits, the so-called "legacy". That anyone still falls for this amazes me — because in almost every previous Games, it has simply never happened.

The costs of stadia, arenas and security rise and rise; the legacy spending stays, at best, the
same, becoming a smaller and smaller proportion of the whole.

London is proving no exception. Currently, the "regeneration and infrastructure" element of 2012's budget is £1.7 billion, just 18 per cent
of the total. Keep that figure in mind when you hear Ken Livingstone talk about the "legacy Games".

Olympic boosters cite the Javelin trains, the new East London line, the redevelopment of Stratford and the building of new homes in the
Thames Gateway as if they were direct consequences of the Games.

But with only one important exception, the soil remediation on the Olympic site, they were all happening anyway.

The only recent Games which did deliver significant non-sporting benefits, Barcelona 92, managed it because the organisers genuinely put legacy first. They spent relatively little on shiny IOC-pleasing facilities. Their main stadium was second-hand. They treated the
Olympics merely as an excuse to improve the things that really mattered, such as their streets and their seafront.

So scrapping the fencing arena and the basketball courts is a great start. But it saves only £200 million; London needs to go much, much further. It's not too late to kill that giant pudding of a stadium: dull, dull, dull, used to
its full capacity for perhaps four days and destined to spend the rest of eternity as a concrete Tony Blair, wondering if it can ever again find suitably important employment.

If you want to regenerate east London, spend the money on regenerating east London. Put housing on that site straight away, and have the athletics at Wembley instead. And yes,
the athletes would have to commute — but so what? They're not paying, we are. The Olympics wasn't sold as being for their benefit. It was meant to be of benefit to us.

Come 2012, I'm sure the venues will be finished on time, that we'll have two fine weeks of sport, and that the opening-ceremony fireworks will be jolly impressive. But that just isn't a good enough return for £10 billion. Without radical change, however, it's pretty much all we're going to get.