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London’s Olympic dream in tatters

The Observer is particularly upbeat this morning:

London has in effect abandoned hope of winning the 2012 Olympic Games, because it is so far behind Paris, key members of the bidding team have told The Observer.

Did anyone ever think that we had a chance of seeing the Olympic Games in London? It was never terribly likely, and I’m not sure that the bid had a great deal of public support anyway, particularly from those who live further north than Coventry, since it just seemed like (yet again) vast amounts of money would be spent on an event in London, while the rest of the country would be pretty much left out.

I realise that the idea was to ship some of the stadia around the country after the event, and that the bid was supposed to reflect benefits for the whole country, but people are never going to see that in a London-centric event. The whole country got behind the Commonwealth Games in Manchester in a way that could never happen with a London-based sporting event.

Of course, if all of this speculation is wrong and Mike Lee (London 2012’s director of communications) is right, then I could end up looking very silly:

Not only is this an open race with everything to play for, but there are also five months to go before the vote. The mood is upbeat and confident. We have received extremely positive feedback on our proposals, and on the details of our candidate file, which we submitted in November.

I’m fairly sure that we won’t win. But I am willing to be proved wrong.

This post was filed under: News and Comment.

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Comments and responses

Comment from sjhoward (author of the post)


    16.47, 06/07/2005

On reflection, I think I possibly spoke too soon, since London’s 2012 bid won. I said I could end up looking very silly, and I have. Oops.


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23:34
17th February 2012.

This post has been referenced by another on this site:
sjhoward.co.uk » Renewed, refreshed, and ready to go . . .


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20:14
17th January 2013.

This post has been referenced by another on this site:
sjhoward.co.uk » My shocking retail predictions




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