ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the story of the bid to host the 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games, focusing on what has now become a familiar predicament for successful candidate cities: an enforced commitment to meeting the spiralling costs of hosting the Games. A Sports Marketing Survey, presented within the 2004 bid book, identified 73 per cent of Londoners and 68 per cent of the UK population wanting the Games to come to London. The bid book postulated that every sector of the economy would benefit from London staging the Games and the whole of the UK would gain from its prosperity'. Of particular interest to the book is the question of why estimates for the cost of policing and wider security, The 2004 bid estimate included 190 million for this cost of providing security during construction. At the time of writing some five years have passed since the bid book journey began.
