Afternoon:
15°c
Memo to Rio from London: enjoy it while it lasts. Brazil's winning of the Olympics last Friday was greeted by Pele in tears, President Lula da Silva weeping with joy and an entire nation ecstatic.
I remember being in Trafalgar Square in 2005. The announcement was so staged that even an old sceptic like me came away moist-eyed. Nothing tugs the heartstrings like civic pride.
But then the Burmese cheered the white elephant into its pen. The Trojans cheered the wooden horse. The second memo to Rio should contain another line.
London Olympics: initial cost £2 billion, current cost £9.3 billion, final cost unknown. And for just two weeks of minority sport.
Last year's Olympics razed hundreds of acres of Beijing, evicted tens of thousands and cost the Chinese $35 billion. It has left behind another empty Olympic stadium.
The citizens of Rio, some of the poorest anywhere, should know what is about to hit them in the demands of the most self-important and extravagant body on earth, the International Olympic Committee.
It will sting Rio for every cent it possesses, until its burghers are weeping like those of London, not for joy but for mercy.
The accolade of winning the games may be glorious but it comes dear.
If the IOC can walk all over Tony Blair and Tessa Jowell and unleash a culture of dodgy developers, bonuses and skim that dwarfs even that of City bankers, imagine what it will do to the delicate political economy of Brazil.
A gold rush is about to begin down south. Its mine will be the Brazilian exchequer but its beneficiaries will not be athletes or spectators but consultants, suppliers and contractors.
Last week, London saw an example of what this means. Jowell and Coe, now helpless puppets on the IOC string, demanded that £43 million be spent on a special shooting range at Woolwich.
This is ludicrous for an event of no public or spectator appeal and for which a site could be found almost anywhere, not least at the National Shooting Centre at Bisley.
Jowell and Coe also refuse to allow badminton and rhythmic gymnastics to be staged in the existing stadium at Wembley, where such sports normally take place.
They want a special, temporary stadium to be built at Barking, at a cost of £25 million, for no other reason than that Barking is nearer Stratford and the IOC insists on its own purpose-designed facilities.
A meeting of the IOC board last month ordered that these temporary facilities go ahead. It behaves as if the games belong to the board, not London, and that it can simply levy unlimited invoices on national taxpayers with no account rendered.
The arrogance is stupefying, and will continue until one day some politician calls its bluff.
At last London's Mayor, Boris Johnson, has begun to do just that, and with the support of his party boss and possible next prime minister, David Cameron.
He has simply refused to pay, as he would have to do, for the new shooting and gymnastic locations, sending the latter to Wembley at a saving of £32 million.
This might seem pocket money to Jowell and Coe but to spend such sums on sheds that will never be needed afterwards is inexcusable at any time, especially one of extreme public sector constraint.
The Mayor is also putting down a crucial marker. From now until 2012, the Olympic bureaucracy at Canary Wharf will be demanding that the existing budget of £9.3 billion rise to £10 billion or £12 billion, with threats that otherwise, "London will get an Olympics on the cheap".
There will be claims that, unless bills are paid and taxes raised, the opening ceremony will be "worse than Beijing's" and the medals tally "humiliating".
Having spent £9 billion, Jowell will say, surely London can find another two or three to have the job well done.
We will also be told that without exorbitant expenditure, there will be "no legacy" - when legacy was supposedly a profit, not a cost.
Indeed Coe is on record as saying that the Games will deliver "a profit".
Perhaps his salary should come out of it. Any student of the Olympic Games knows that there is never a legacy.
As Sydney and Athens showed, the Olympics never lead to a tourism surge. In 2012 Stratford, given its location, will be half empty and many London hotels unfilled.
All London has is a "legacy czar", imported from Pennsylvania at the exorbitant fee of £200,000 a year. His remit from the Government is, hilariously, "to dampen expectation".
The final memo to Rio is, "now is your chance". There was a brief moment at the start of the London Olympics round when the British Cabinet could have claimed ownership of the games.
It could have stipulated that the era of chauvinist extravagance, in descent from Berlin 1936 to Beijing 2008, was over.
It could have said that the London games would show how any big city could shoehorn a fortnight of sport into its existing facilities.
Of these, from Wembley and the Dome to the smallest sports hall, the city has plenty.
London could have done this with ease, opening up the Olymics to smaller world cities that cannot contemplate the IOC's costs.
In the event, ministers were carried away by the glory of "winning the games", of erecting grandiose new venues and spending gargantuan budgets.
Such budgets, with so little to show for them, simply run away with themselves.
Unless Rio wants to bankrupt its city or, as in Greece's case, its national exchequer, it should strike now.
It should do what London failed to do and plan an Olympics that is a credit to the gods of sport, not to those of construction and high finance.
Reader views (6)
'Lord' Seb Coe and Ken Livingston hustled themselves stupid to promote London's winning bid to stage the Olympics. Now both are yesterday's men, rarely referred to without embarrassment or by an angry London public. It could be argued that the vast overspend at the Olympics site in East London, the chaos and the way it bulldozed business and residents out of the way, cost Livingston his Mayor-ship. Added to the insult of the financial injury they've caused Londoners, we're landed with this white elephant of staging these costly Olympic games at a time of severe British recession and drastic public spending cutbacks.
These two foolish men have cost us a lot of public money which was wastefully being squandered long before the financial crisis. We're now expected to pay out of the emptying coffers for games few Londoners wanted.
Every time Livingston and Coe leave their homes it should be compulsory that they be made to wear tabards emblazoned with the words, "Vanity, vanity, all is vanity".
- Geoffrey, London
Unfortunately, it is not just a matter of budgets running away with themselves. Practically every Games since 1968 has put in a 'back of the envelope' bid which underestimated the costs and over-estimated the income. I sat on the London Assembly at the time of the bid in 2005, and I described it as a bid for a £10 billion Olympics. Straightforward arithmetic made clear that that would be a likely figure. I was described as 'extremist' by all parties who were mindlessly cheerleading and chanting 'back the bid'. The most ludicrous aspect was a security costing which was less than a third of what Athens had just spent the previous year. So we were told that 7 years hence we would spend a third of what Athens had just spent, in a City like London with its obsession with the War on Terror, its involvement in Middle East wars and the rapid escalation of costly security technology. The only thing more astonishing to me was the fact that all the main political parties appeared to simply close their ears and fail to even register the facts. The same stance, indeed, as most commentators and journalists.
- Damian Hockney, London, UK
I understand that the horses will churn up and ruin Greenwich Park, rather than go to the ready- made horse venue at Badminton on the grounds that Badminton is too far away from London.
If memory serves me correct, at the Mexico Olympics, the humans were obliged to run distance races at altitude - but not the precious horses, who had their own event, hundreds of miles away at sea-level.
Seems like the IOC can pick and choose when they feel like it.
- William Boreham, Kingston upon Thames.
Still, the whole process has entertainment value, such as the Obama embarrassment. Incredible arrogance justly rewarded.
- Mikes, London
Perhaps David Cameron can give an election pledge to scrap it along with heathrow`s third runway - times are hard, all in debt, tighten our belts and all that - or are sporting celebrities, jobs for migrant workers and OBE wanabees above all that?
Oh, No, It`s to promote the health of the nation, isn`t it?
Sorry, I forgot.
- Darius, London UK
There will be a legacy from the 2012 Olympics. It will exist in the bank accounts of all the contractors, sub-contractors, consultants, bureaucrats, regulators, suppliers and everyone else that's managed to get their snouts into this golden trough.
And let's not forget the other legacy. The one in every Londoner's tax bills. We will be paying for this financial extravaganza for the next 30 years. That's what I call a legacy.
- Kate, London
