Don't play their Games

Simon Hafer on why it would be a thoroughly bad thing if the Olympics came to London According to a recent opinion poll conducted by ICM, 75 per cent of Britons back London's bid to host the 2012 Olympic Games. This is as well, because apparently those who will make the decision about awarding the Games — the 122 members of the International Olympic Committee — reckon that 70 per cent support in the potential host population is the bare minimum. It is hard, in fact, to find anyone outside the usual ranks of sceptics and cynics who feel London should not have the Games. Newspaper editors and broadcasting chiefs worry about preaching 'negativity'. Fears about the huge expense of the project, the difficulties with infrastructure. and Britain's dismal recent record of trying to build sporting facilities or organise other great public works have been put to one side. If, in July next year when the voting finally takes place, Britain does not get the Games, none of the usual suspects wishes to be identified as a scapegoat. On the other hand, if London gets the Games, then everyone wants to be able to line up to take some credit.

Yet scepticism and cynicism are called for. They are provoked by two separate considerations. The first is the Olympic ideal itself which, like every other aspect of sport, has been tarnished by money, politics and drugs. Although its act is said to have been considerably cleaned up in recent years, the IOC under its previous boss Juan Antonio Samaranch was a byword for corruption. The stain of this still lingers. Although no one is suggesting that the London bid is seeking to bribe anybody, a BBC Panorama 'sting' investigation recently managed to find one delegate — a Bulgarian — who made it abundantly clear that he was only too willing to be bribed, if anyone cared to buy him. His future is being considered by the IOC, though no decision will be made about him until the very meeting next July when the 2012 hosts are named. So anyone who suggests that the IOC is squeaky clean, and will be swayed only by technical considerations, might still be somewhat wide of the mark.

The second cause for scepticism is the can't-do culture of Britain itself. The fiascos of Wembley Stadium, Pickett's Lock and the Dome are well known. Lord Coe, the genial and well-motivated chairman of the London bid, says the construction teams are ready to start work the day after a decision is made by the IOC. No doubt the new stadia needed for the Games will be built in the ensuing seven years. But the real problem is with transport links to a currently barren part of east London. Given the huge numbers of visitors who come into London through Heathrow, the airport could not be worse situated for the East End. Once you can make it from Heathrow to Paddington on the pricy express train, then change and change again at King's Cross, you will at least be getting close to the action. A new fast link is planned from St Pancras to Stratford, with so-called javelin trains' taking only seven minutes to complete a journey that would now, by Tube, take a good 20 if you were lucky. The javelin trains will then continue on to Ebbsfleet in Kent, where they will join up with the Channel Tunnel link due to open in 2007. Optimists say this will allow the fast transit to and from the Games of visitors from the near Continent. Pessimists say the Channel Tunnel link, at least, will make it much easier for Britons to get to Paris in 2012 if, as the bookmakers expect, the French capital wins the contest.

An IOC report last May described many of the trains in London as 'obsolete'. Lord Coe has said, probably wisely, that he doesn't wish to become embroiled in an argument about underinvestment in transport over the last 60 years, but would rather concentrate on what is to be done for the future. Speaking of the London Underground, he recently told an interviewer, 'There are stresses and strains but it is not a Third World system. I travel on it every day and we move more people per day than other bidding cities. My primary task is to put together a plan that will work for four weeks because this is the most competitive Olympic bid ever, but £17 billion is going to be spent on London transport in the next 12 years. The question is, can we move 250,000 people an hour in and out of the capital? The answer is, yes we can.' Of course, in 12 years' time the 2012 Olympics will have been and gone. Others of us who, like Lord Coe, travel on the Underground every day suspect that even if that £17 billion were spent in the next seven years, we would still not have a Tube system that worked. Where the railways around and in London are concerned, Lord Coe's views appear to be a classic case of the triumph of hope over experience.

Should the Games happen in London, it would be a good time for all those who live or work in the capital to be somewhere else. A total traffic exclusion zone will operate around all the venues, with only accredited vehicles allowed in. Some 2,500 such vehicles, bearing IOC dignitaries and officials and possibly even some competitors, will be able to get swiftly around London with the aid of 150 miles of designated lanes. The displacement of other, non-Olympics-related traffic will be awesome. An experiment has already taken place in which, with the computer-controlled special phasing of traffic lights, Lord Coe was able to get from the West End to Stratford in 21 minutes at ten o'clock in the morning. A larger-scale operation to alter sequences has staggering potential for chaos, as anyone who has seen this sort of thing attempted in other cities will be only too well aware.

Yet the bid claims that the Games will be worth having not just to boost national pride and amour propre, but because of their 'legacy'. They will regenerate 1,500 acres of the lower Lea Valley, which could certainly do with it. They will create a 124-acre 'Hyde Park of the East'. The Olympic village will provide 3,600 apartments, with a 'significant' number of them being low-cost accommodation. Some sporting facilities being built from scratch will stay. others (including a couple of swimming pools) will be dismantled and sent to the provinces. In the short term there will 7,000 construction jobs, and 12,000 more later on. The final seal of approval came from a poll of corporate accountants in the south-east, two thirds of whom said the Games would be good for business. Digby Jones, director-general of the CBI and an 'ambassador' for the bid, said it would be 'an unmatchable prize with enormous opportunities for businesses in the run-up, during, and after the event'. We must only hope that if the Games happen here, British business will be equal to the challenge of taking them.

The projected cost of £3 billion is about half that of the Athens Games, not least because many of the sporting venues have already been built. Wembley will be up and running by then — they hope — and there will be archery at Lord's and volleyball on Horse Guards Parade. Much of the project is to be privately funded, including £650 million for the village itself. However, the present headline figure is unlikely to bear much resemblance to the final bill. The government has agreed to become the ultimate financial guarantor of the London Games, with Gordon Brown (who no doubt expects to be

Mind your language

John Humphrys writes well, in this respect: his style captures exactly his broadcasting voice. That is a mixed blessing. Anyway, in his new book Lost for Words (Hodder and Stoughton, £14.99) he is worried about the

mangling and the manipulation of English. On page 106 he states a principle: 'Verbs can refresh a sentence any time they are needed — but not if they earned their crust as nouns in an earlier life.'

'When and why did "progress" become a verb, as in "Let's progress this development"?' he wonders. 'Probably about the same time as "impact".' But it is not difficult to discover that this speculation is wrong. Progress, having had a successful career as a noun since the early 15th century, took up a vacancy as a verb in the 16th; Shakespeare uses it. If Mr Humphrys's hatred is not, as he first implied, of a noun recently turned verb, is it of progress newly used transitively (that is, with an object)? No, for progress, as in 'progress this development', has been so used since 1875 or earlier. The first citation in the OED refers to ores being progressed in a process, but less material objects are evident too. Nevil Shute was happy to write, 'Progress the design and construction of the factory.'

What of impact? That too is an old word with several strands of meaning. The dictionary, no constant friend of Mr Humphrys, tells us it is indeed found earliest as a verb, not a noun. I'm not sure if Mr Humphrys is equally repelled by transvestite verbs donning nominal clothes. Here again, his real distaste seems to be for the transitive usage. Of that the OED provides an example from 1945, when Mr Humphrys was just interrupting his parents with his first lisping words.

Turn over a page or two and he's regretting the omission of the preposition against after the verb battle, as in 'The American force battles the insurgents.' No they don't,' he rules, 'they battle against them.' Then he shifts his ground, 'Better still, they fight them. "Battle" is a noun.' In fact, battle has been used, both as a transitive and an intransitive verb, since the 14th century.

So, what are we left with? Mr Humphrys dislikes a vogue for using certain verbs that can also be nouns. But that has more to do with voguishness than the age-old process of changing one part of speech to another. I applaud his antipathy to unlovely choices of words. It's his reasoning I take issue with. prime minister at the time) promising to use taxpayers money to make up any shortfall between revenue and expenditure. That could have dire consequences not just for London council taxpayers, but for all of us. The habit that such works have of doubling, trebling or quadrupling their initial budgets (as with the ludicrous Scottish Parliament building) could help incur enormous penalties for the taxpayer. Also, London has many more problems apart from lousy infrastructure that are unlikely to disappear before 2012, given the present lack of political will, and which would make the Games less than enjoyable: rising violent crime and overcrowding are the two most obvious.

These, though, are mere practical considerations. The more fundamental issue is whether right-thinking people should want any truck with an event whose ethos is being ravaged by drugs scandals and the most unappealing sort of professionalism. Also, having done all it can to close down grass-roots sporting facilities, it smacks of hypocrisy for the government to want to host the Olympics.

Then there is the row going on between the five bidding cities Moscow, Madrid, New York and Paris being the others — about the unethical use of the respective countries' diplomats to engage in greasing up to IOC members. Bill Rammell, a Foreign Office minister, recently circulated embassies with a memo urging our men and

women abroad to invite IOC members to jolly parties and other events and to try to give them 'an enjoyable evening'. Would it not be better to spend that £3 billion now on significant facilities to improve the quality of life around London? The Lea Valley does not need an Olympic Games as an excuse to be regenerated. If Mr Prescott must build houses all over the Home Counties, why not start by putting some there, now? Aren't the Olympics just a vain extravagance that will, more likely than not, be a jolly good party that paralyses much of the capital for a month, and then gives the taxpayer a headache for years afterwards?

Lord Coe, a Conservative, perhaps does not also realise how the Labour machine will, in a manner not unlike the hosts of the 1936 Games in Berlin or the 1980 ones in Moscow, hijack the whole experience for political reasons. I do not doubt he means well, but he risks becoming New Labour's patsy. An Olympic Games in London in 2012 would be the wrong place at the wrong time. The right time will come for London, but only once our culture of incompetence and our distorted sense of priorities have been eradicated, and London has been made fit to welcome the world. Seven years is not, sadly, nearly time enough to achieve such a revolution.

Simon Heifer is a columnist on the Daily Mail.