Spectator Sport

16 May 2009

The Olympic champion

There’s an awful lot of ghastliness in sport: from Didier Drogba, John Terry and Michael Ballack raving at the referee (that’s the captains of Germany and England behaving like a couple of hysterical schoolgirls), to a sozzled Ledley King shouting the odds at a nightclub doorman. Or Chris Gayle coming over to lead a totally demoralised West Indies cricket team and giving every impression he would rather be anywhere else in the world; though ideally, of course, over in South Africa picking up the readies in the IPL. Oh, and wasn’t it just a tad thoughtless of Andrew Strauss to enforce the follow-on in the first Test knowing it would effectively finish the match in three days and so deprive all cricket-lovers of the 100-carat joy of a sunny Saturday at a Lord’s Test?

But enough of all that. Time to celebrate a real British achievement. The other day a small but rather significant event came and went largely under the radar, probably because it was a genuinely good news story. What happened was that the International Olympic Committee came over to run a slide rule over London’s progress towards the 2012 Games, and gave it the highest mark it had ever given to any city at this stage. And this is all in the teeth of a biting recession. It’s also a properly Keynesian success story, creating thousands of jobs in a very hammered part of east London.

What the IOC actually said was that the transformation of the Lea Valley was ‘nothing short of astounding’. And it’s true. I went round the Olympic Park a few months back and it took my breath away. All the main sites were underway: you can see the magnificent main stadium take shape; there’s the velodrome and the awesome Aquatic Centre which looks like being one of the very few Zaha Hadid projects that will actually get built; and the power station — an extraordinary piece of infrastructure in its own right. And everywhere the sense of what this will be like after the Games — a really amazing piece of parkland. If you get a chance make the trip: the ODA run them from their Canary Wharf HQ and it’s something you won’t regret. It really does (cue some Elgar here) make you very proud to be British.

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