Hold up! Before you read on, please read this...

This post was published more than 15 years ago

I keep old posts on the site because I often enjoy reading old content on other people's sites. It can be interesting to see how views have changed over time: for example, how my strident teenage views have, to put it mildly, mellowed.

I'm not a believer in brushing the past under the carpet. I've written some offensive rubbish on here in the past: deleting it and pretending it never happened doesn't change that. I hope that stumbling across something that's 15 years old won't offend anyone anew, because I hope that people can understand that what I thought and felt and wrote about then is probably very different to what I think and feel and write about now. It's a relic of an (albeit recent) bygone era.

So, given the age of this post, please bear in mind:

• My views may well have changed in the last 15 years. I have written some very silly things over the years, many of which I find utterly cringeworthy today.
• This post might use words or language in ways which I would now consider highly inappropriate, offensive, embarrassing, or all three.
• Factual information might be outdated.
• Links might be broken, and embedded material might not appear properly.

Okay. Consider yourself duly warned. Read on...

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.