ABSTRACT
On Wednesday, 6 July 2005, the International Olympic Committee’s meeting in Singapore voted to award the 2012 Summer Olympics to London. The decision represented a combination of Eurovision-style partisanship, tactical voting,1 global schmoozing and last minute surprises. London’s coup de grâce, another steal from the French, was a multicultural-faced group of excited East End children, in contrast to the sombre suited Parisian messieurs. Celebrations began in Stratford, the nondescript town centre of the London borough of Newham, and the heart of the prospective Olympic Village. The next day, four suicide bombers killed fiftysix people, including themselves, in attacks on underground trains and a bus in central London. The 2012 celebration party was cut short and thinking inevitably started to focus on the size of the task ahead, with all its attendant problems. These started with the security considerations in the face of the renewed terror threat and the woefully underestimated capital budget used in the successful bid, which not only excluded the extra security costs, but VAT and other taxes on construction that together added £1.5 billion on to the original £4 billion bid estimate. By March 2007 the publicly-funded Olympic infrastructure budget stood at £9.375 billion, excluding the costs of staging the event, land acquisition and wider regeneration and transport investment.
