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‘A massive betrayal’: how London’s Olympic legacy was sold out

32 points by nigerian1981 4y ago

jpm_sd 4y ago
This has happened to every modern Olympics venue. "This time it'll be different" is always wishful thinking. The amount of money that goes into building these single-use venues continues to be completely bonkers.
- jonp888 4y ago
  Which single use venues are your referring to, exactly? All the venues built for the London Olympics are either still in active use, or were specifically designed to be temporary.
  - jpm_sd 4y ago
    Every dedicated Olympics complex built in every host nation? Sure, they get a little bit of use afterward, but not nearly enough to justify the expense of construction.
    - jbjbjbjb 4y ago
      Isn’t the usual problem that most of these venues are just simply left to rot? That’s not the case for London. The problem this piece highlights is “just” that the redevelopment didn’t fulfil the promises on affordable housing. It’s a lovely place for those who can afford it.
      - JKCalhoun 4y ago
        The term "affordable housing" has begun to bother me lately. Another way to make affordable housing is to instead raise the wages of the bottom-earners?
- tzs 4y ago
  It didn't happen in Los Angeles for the 1984 Olympics. The Los Angeles area has so many pro sports teams with stadiums or arenas and so many colleges with stadiums or arenas that most of what they needed was already covered. They only had to build two new permanent venues and make some temporary adjustments to some of the existing ones. The new ones were a velodrome and a swim stadium, both paid for by corporate sponsors. The velodrome was built at a Cal State university paid for by 7-11, and the swim stadium was built at USC and paid for by McDonalds. Both of those venues were useful after the Olympics. The velodrome was the only Olympic standard velodrome in the US and remained in use until 2004 when it was replaced with a bigger facility nearby that included an Olympic velodrome plus facilities for some other sports. The swim stadium hosted many major swim events until 2013 when it was closed and renovated and resumes hosting major events. Los Angeles was also able to make its Olympic Village and athlete housing cheaply. They used undergraduate housing at USC and UCLA. Combined they have enough on-campus housing for something like 35000 undergraduates, most of which is empty over the summer. Los Angeles has so much normally going on when it comes to large events and tourism that an Olympics is not really a big deal there when it comes to infrastructure.
  - gamblor956 4y ago
    To further your comment, all 3 times LA got the Olympics it was because nobody else wanted them...because they were getting too expensive. And the first two times, LA showed that an Olympics could be done profitably, by reusing existing facilities. For the 2028 Olympics, LA is following in the footsteps of the 1984 Olympics and reusing undergraduate housing and sports venues. LA has 5 soccer/track and field stadiums (Rose Bowl, Coliseum, Sofi, Dignity Health, and Banc of California), 5 Arenas (Forum, Staples, Galen Center, Pauley Pavilion, and the forthcoming Intuit Dome), 4 baseball stadiums (Dodgers, Angels, USC, and UCLA), 4 Olympic-size pools (Expo Park, USC, UCLA, and Loyola Marymount)...and these are just the major venues with Olympics-level seating. Also, the LA, Anaheim, and Long Beach convention centers are available for indoor early-round events that somehow can't fit into the aforementioned venues. The only venue being purpose-built just for the Games is the media center, which will be constructed by NBC at its own expense.
iandanforth 4y ago
Any city that hosts the games deserves exactly what they get. The money spent, the legal exemptions, the short and long term disruptions. If you're willfully blind to 50 years of evidence I have no sympathy left for you.
bannedbybros 4y ago
agd 4y ago
You can’t transform the area and expect it to remain cheap. I lived in the Olympic Village for 3 years and they did a great job: - lovely park - completely pedestrianised - good, and still relatively affordable, apartments Feels like a success to me.
- leoedin 4y ago
  Yes, this article feels slightly disingenuous. "We campaigned to bring the Olympics to an industrial area full of dirty industrial businesses so it would regenerate, and it did, and now we're angry that our dirty industrial businesses are gone and the area is appealing to live in". Unfortunately the reality is that gentrification and regeneration go hand in hand. If you make an area modern, clean and pleasant then it will become desirable. Desirable areas cost more because they are desirable. Businesses invest in improving areas because that will make them more valuable. The problems in Stratford - "locals" getting driven out by new developments - are not really due to the Olympics. They're playing out in every corner of London (and many other western cities), and the causes are the familiar bogeymen of rising housing costs - low interest rates, population growth and demographics, and the increasing concentration of high paying jobs in a limited number of cities.
everyone 4y ago
I mean, anyone who believed the bullshit back in 2005 was being hopelessly naive, to put it mildly.
jonp888 4y ago
Comment was wrong and has been deleted.
- johnsanders 4y ago
  Ken Livingstone was many things, but "right-wing mayor" is not among them.
  - jonp888 4y ago
    I apologise. I will delete my ill-informed comment.
- blibble 4y ago
  I don't think anyone alive would consider "Red" Ken Livingston to be right wing
- christkv 4y ago
  You mean Red Ken Livingston. I think he would be insulted by being called conservative
  - iso1631 4y ago
    At the time didn't he feel insulted by being linked to Blair's Labour?
- VoodooJuJu 4y ago
  I see you've "deleted" your comment, but I encourage you to restore it with the original text, just replace "right-wing" with "left-wing" this time. Just seems a bit asymmetric, disingenuous, and unfair that you would use "right-wing" as a criticism but not the other way around.
dijit 4y ago
I lived in London between 2011-2014, just before I left my internet connection was upgraded from an extremely unreliable ADSL that wasnt strong enough to open twitter after 5pm and would randomly drop entire internet prefixes: to symmetric 1G FTTC with IPv6. Why? Because the Olympic infrastructure investments were being sold off and providers were just paying for the last mile. Internet is an insane economic multiplier and the City would have suffered massively during the pandemic had this infrastructure improvement not happened. Should it have happened independently? Definitely. Would it? I wouldn't bet on it. So, I think its easy to overlook these second order effects, but I witnessed it first hand- I was seriously considering leaving the capitol due to the inability to be on-call effectively; I didn't have mobile data in my apartment either.
- alexalx666 4y ago
  yes, but, If you don't have any control over essential infra via government reps or something its just bad and you should help change that, following your logic if there is an explosion in old housing its ok since the housing infra will be updated
- gumby 4y ago
  This is like a deranged version of Bastiat's broken window fallacy. The silver lining of bombing a city flat is all the construction jobs that are created.
- Reason077 4y ago
  Multiple companies are, to this day, regularly digging up streets all over London to install 1G+ FTTH, so I'm not sure it had too much to do with the Olympics. Personally I'm not sure fibre is even all that important anymore. My previous flat had abysmal slow ADSL, and no fibre available, but blisteringly fast 5G that you could get for £30/month with no contract.
  - dijit 4y ago
    Hyperoptic (my ISP at the time) wouldn't have rolled out FTTC if not for the back-haul capacity supplied from the Olympic village. I didn't have 4G/LTE (or even 3G) in my flat. It was really untenable. I don't really understand the other replies to my comment, are people upset that houses got demolished? lots of single family homes are gone but there's a lot more mid/high density in the area now. Towers in Stratford that came about from the developments in the area. I was living in Bow in mid-density apartment blocks (4-5 floors, near Devon Road DLR) if that helps give context.
securingsincity 4y ago
In 2015 it had been determined that Boston was going to make a bid to host the olympics in 2024. What took place was a grassroots campaign and clear heads that stopped the process. While some of the development would have been cool to see, I'm incredibly grateful we didn't go down that path https://www.wbur.org/news/2015/07/27/why-boston-olympics-bid-failed https://www.wbur.org/news/2015/07/27/why-boston-olympics-bid...
- lifefeed 4y ago
  I was still living in Boston in 2015, and I happy to see my city put a stop to that. We still have collective PTSD from the Big Dig, and we can identify a "over-promises and under-delivers" from a mile away.
  - azemetre 4y ago
    Calling the big dig ptsd is delusional. The big dig probably increased real estate values in the tens of billions. Not to mention the health aspects of less pollution from cars and all the new businesses/restaurants created.
    - ghaff 4y ago
      PTSD is hyperbolic obviously. But it was pretty bad to live through and I didn't even live in the city. And it was hugely over budget and schedule. Fortunately, thanks to Tip O'Neill the rest of the country at least paid most of the bill. Thanks for that! But, at the end of the day, it was a huge improvement for Boston even if traffic is still mostly pretty bad. Just getting rid of the elevated highway to reconnect downtown to the North End is a big improvement for the city--as is airport access which was pretty ridiculous before.
    - throwaway0a5e 4y ago
      Giving the big dig credit for an economic revitalization that happened to damn near every city over the same time period is disingenuous at best. Money spent ensuring that some jerk in his apartment downtown didn't have to look at a highway is money not spent improving the T or fixing other highway problem points for a sum total of the same or better economic effect. Making transit options not suck increase property values regardless of how you make them. It's the results that matter. Green Monster V2 that yielded the same transit times between various points would have had the same economic effect. And this ignores the fact that the state let all sorts of infrastructure go into disrepair over the course of the project and we're still digging out of that hole.
sizzzzlerz 4y ago
When it comes to building up the winning countries infrastructure in support of hosting the games, it always, always is about ultimately feeding that money into the pockets of the rich and the connected. It doesn't matter whether the country is first world or third world, the same people are the winners every single time and the poor, the losers. The olympics are the world's largest and longest running Ponzi scheme.
- Bayart 4y ago
  I wish people stopped using « Ponzi scheme » for anything and everything. It is not a Ponzi scheme. And even if it were, it probably wouldn't be the largest.
- DocTomoe 4y ago
  Yep, the subways, the streets, the parks, the new apartments, the sports venues, that all only benefits the rich and the connected. Calm your horses, Mr. Marx.
lucraft 4y ago
At the time I calculated that if all the money spent on the 2012 Olympics (supposedly to inspire a nation's children to love sport) was instead given as endowments, then every single secondary school in England would receive something like £150,000 a year extra in their budget to spend on sport - in perpetuity.
pg_bot 4y ago
I think it is likely that the Olympics will move to a permanent location or a rotation of host cities in the future. Most local governments and populations have realized that building the infrastructure for the games is a losing proposition. The process for bidding is ripe for local and international corruption and the IOC vacuums up all of the profits.
- mschuster91 4y ago
  I'd rather guess that, similar to FIFA World Cups and F1 races it will be mostly a rotation between the dictatorships that can pay the most. There aren't many democracies left willing to pay for either of these mega events (or in case of F1, the starting fees for the teams), but there will always be a decent supply of dictatorships or oil sheiks wishing to white-wash their image and a supply of delegates/decisionmakers who can be bribed appropriately.
  - lesstyzing 4y ago
    4/22 F1 races are in 'dictatorships'. Two of chose races have existed for many years (10-20 years). Doesn't seem like there's been a rush to dictatorships based on that. Apart from Qatar (and arguably Russia) World Cup's, including the one after Qatar don't appear to have been held in dictatorships at all.
  - notahacker 4y ago
    The next two Olympics are being held in Paris and Los Angeles. The oil sheikdom World Cup is being followed by one shared between the US, Canada and Mexico. Formula One added events in Miami, Holland and Portugal to the calendar recently along with lomg standing events in several other democracies plus some petrostates and China. The idea that democracies aren't interested in hosting major sporting events isn't based in reality.
    - mschuster91 4y ago
      > The idea that democracies aren't interested in hosting major sporting events isn't based in reality. It's based on all of the contra-Olympic/WC movements that tend to crop up and successfully prevent any talks as soon as even rumors begin floating around. > plus some petrostates and China Out of the last 20 years worth of additions to the F1 calendar, we have Jeddah (Saudi-Arabia), Doha (Qatar), Baku (Azerbaijan), Sochi (Russia), Abu Dhabi (UAE), Istanbul (Turkey), Singapore, Bahrain and Shanghai (China) - which means 17 new tracks, of which nine are in a dictatorship of one or another kind. That's just way too much appeasing to bribery for me.
lesstyzing 4y ago
I'm not sure I understand this. The Olympics certainly massively improved certain areas. Hackney Wick has went from a handful of warehouses and junkyards to having a brand new train station, lots of new apartment blocks, bars and restaurants. Stratford and the Olympic's area between it and Hackney Wick has also seen massive development. Expecting this development to come with stacks of council housing is unfortunately naive. London obviously has big issues when it comes to affordable housing but using that to discredit the huge amount of development that came about because of the Olympics is silly.
- rayiner 4y ago
  How is it a good thing that employment places for working class people were replaced with housing and entertainment for yuppies?
  - jimmytidey 4y ago
    Lots of (formerly) less affluent people owned houses in the area and now live close to much better facilities than they did before. Nothing 'yuppie' about a nice park, Westfield shopping centre or a train station?
    - ghaff 4y ago
      Gentrification and redevelopment has winners and losers. But I'm not sure the answer is to just let low income, rundown neighborhoods rot instead.
  - simonh 4y ago
    The working class people weren't "replaced", any that did leave just sold their houses to Yuppies. Many of them may have just became Middle Class. Or just now live in a much nicer area. Perish the thought.
  - lesstyzing 4y ago
    A lot of the businesses were already struggling (as per the article) and given the 'death of the high street' and the pandemic, probably would have died anyway. It unfortunate, but natural, that if you improve an area with newer housing and amenities that different people will move in and lots of businesses will no longer be required while other types of businesses will be required.
DocTomoe 4y ago
I don't get the "abandoned venues" line. There are successful post-olympic uses - for starters, the Munich olympic park is still a major meeting area, and is still used for sports. It's Olympic village is a great place to live at (disclaimer: I did), both for homeowners as well as for students. I hear similar news from the Barcelona olympic venues. Maybe it is not the Olympics to blame when your city is failing it's post-olympic legacy, but your city (and thus: your fellow citizens)?
- jbjbjbjb 4y ago
  The article isn’t saying the venues were abandoned but more that they didn’t fulfil the promises on affordable housing.
whywhywhywhy 4y ago
What a surprise, exactly what we said would happen happened. Honestly The Olympics is a truly disgusting farce when you dig into the realities of it and the absurd committee demands.

32 points by nigerian1981 4y ago

This has happened to every modern Olympics venue. "This time it'll be different" is always wishful thinking. The amount of money that goes into building these single-use venues continues to be completely bonkers.

jonp888 4y ago
Which single use venues are your referring to, exactly? All the venues built for the London Olympics are either still in active use, or were specifically designed to be temporary.
- jpm_sd 4y ago
  Every dedicated Olympics complex built in every host nation? Sure, they get a little bit of use afterward, but not nearly enough to justify the expense of construction.
  - jbjbjbjb 4y ago
    Isn’t the usual problem that most of these venues are just simply left to rot? That’s not the case for London. The problem this piece highlights is “just” that the redevelopment didn’t fulfil the promises on affordable housing. It’s a lovely place for those who can afford it.
    - JKCalhoun 4y ago
      The term "affordable housing" has begun to bother me lately. Another way to make affordable housing is to instead raise the wages of the bottom-earners?
tzs 4y ago
It didn't happen in Los Angeles for the 1984 Olympics. The Los Angeles area has so many pro sports teams with stadiums or arenas and so many colleges with stadiums or arenas that most of what they needed was already covered. They only had to build two new permanent venues and make some temporary adjustments to some of the existing ones. The new ones were a velodrome and a swim stadium, both paid for by corporate sponsors. The velodrome was built at a Cal State university paid for by 7-11, and the swim stadium was built at USC and paid for by McDonalds. Both of those venues were useful after the Olympics. The velodrome was the only Olympic standard velodrome in the US and remained in use until 2004 when it was replaced with a bigger facility nearby that included an Olympic velodrome plus facilities for some other sports. The swim stadium hosted many major swim events until 2013 when it was closed and renovated and resumes hosting major events. Los Angeles was also able to make its Olympic Village and athlete housing cheaply. They used undergraduate housing at USC and UCLA. Combined they have enough on-campus housing for something like 35000 undergraduates, most of which is empty over the summer. Los Angeles has so much normally going on when it comes to large events and tourism that an Olympics is not really a big deal there when it comes to infrastructure.
- gamblor956 4y ago
  To further your comment, all 3 times LA got the Olympics it was because nobody else wanted them...because they were getting too expensive. And the first two times, LA showed that an Olympics could be done profitably, by reusing existing facilities. For the 2028 Olympics, LA is following in the footsteps of the 1984 Olympics and reusing undergraduate housing and sports venues. LA has 5 soccer/track and field stadiums (Rose Bowl, Coliseum, Sofi, Dignity Health, and Banc of California), 5 Arenas (Forum, Staples, Galen Center, Pauley Pavilion, and the forthcoming Intuit Dome), 4 baseball stadiums (Dodgers, Angels, USC, and UCLA), 4 Olympic-size pools (Expo Park, USC, UCLA, and Loyola Marymount)...and these are just the major venues with Olympics-level seating. Also, the LA, Anaheim, and Long Beach convention centers are available for indoor early-round events that somehow can't fit into the aforementioned venues. The only venue being purpose-built just for the Games is the media center, which will be constructed by NBC at its own expense.

iandanforth 4y ago

Any city that hosts the games deserves exactly what they get. The money spent, the legal exemptions, the short and long term disruptions. If you're willfully blind to 50 years of evidence I have no sympathy left for you.

bannedbybros 4y ago

agd 4y ago

You can’t transform the area and expect it to remain cheap. I lived in the Olympic Village for 3 years and they did a great job: - lovely park - completely pedestrianised - good, and still relatively affordable, apartments Feels like a success to me.

leoedin 4y ago
Yes, this article feels slightly disingenuous. "We campaigned to bring the Olympics to an industrial area full of dirty industrial businesses so it would regenerate, and it did, and now we're angry that our dirty industrial businesses are gone and the area is appealing to live in". Unfortunately the reality is that gentrification and regeneration go hand in hand. If you make an area modern, clean and pleasant then it will become desirable. Desirable areas cost more because they are desirable. Businesses invest in improving areas because that will make them more valuable. The problems in Stratford - "locals" getting driven out by new developments - are not really due to the Olympics. They're playing out in every corner of London (and many other western cities), and the causes are the familiar bogeymen of rising housing costs - low interest rates, population growth and demographics, and the increasing concentration of high paying jobs in a limited number of cities.

everyone 4y ago

I mean, anyone who believed the bullshit back in 2005 was being hopelessly naive, to put it mildly.

jonp888 4y ago

Comment was wrong and has been deleted.

johnsanders 4y ago
Ken Livingstone was many things, but "right-wing mayor" is not among them.
- jonp888 4y ago
  I apologise. I will delete my ill-informed comment.
blibble 4y ago
I don't think anyone alive would consider "Red" Ken Livingston to be right wing
christkv 4y ago
You mean Red Ken Livingston. I think he would be insulted by being called conservative
- iso1631 4y ago
  At the time didn't he feel insulted by being linked to Blair's Labour?
VoodooJuJu 4y ago
I see you've "deleted" your comment, but I encourage you to restore it with the original text, just replace "right-wing" with "left-wing" this time. Just seems a bit asymmetric, disingenuous, and unfair that you would use "right-wing" as a criticism but not the other way around.

dijit 4y ago

I lived in London between 2011-2014, just before I left my internet connection was upgraded from an extremely unreliable ADSL that wasnt strong enough to open twitter after 5pm and would randomly drop entire internet prefixes: to symmetric 1G FTTC with IPv6. Why? Because the Olympic infrastructure investments were being sold off and providers were just paying for the last mile. Internet is an insane economic multiplier and the City would have suffered massively during the pandemic had this infrastructure improvement not happened. Should it have happened independently? Definitely. Would it? I wouldn't bet on it. So, I think its easy to overlook these second order effects, but I witnessed it first hand- I was seriously considering leaving the capitol due to the inability to be on-call effectively; I didn't have mobile data in my apartment either.

alexalx666 4y ago
yes, but, If you don't have any control over essential infra via government reps or something its just bad and you should help change that, following your logic if there is an explosion in old housing its ok since the housing infra will be updated
gumby 4y ago
This is like a deranged version of Bastiat's broken window fallacy. The silver lining of bombing a city flat is all the construction jobs that are created.
Reason077 4y ago
Multiple companies are, to this day, regularly digging up streets all over London to install 1G+ FTTH, so I'm not sure it had too much to do with the Olympics. Personally I'm not sure fibre is even all that important anymore. My previous flat had abysmal slow ADSL, and no fibre available, but blisteringly fast 5G that you could get for £30/month with no contract.
- dijit 4y ago
  Hyperoptic (my ISP at the time) wouldn't have rolled out FTTC if not for the back-haul capacity supplied from the Olympic village. I didn't have 4G/LTE (or even 3G) in my flat. It was really untenable. I don't really understand the other replies to my comment, are people upset that houses got demolished? lots of single family homes are gone but there's a lot more mid/high density in the area now. Towers in Stratford that came about from the developments in the area. I was living in Bow in mid-density apartment blocks (4-5 floors, near Devon Road DLR) if that helps give context.

securingsincity 4y ago

In 2015 it had been determined that Boston was going to make a bid to host the olympics in 2024. What took place was a grassroots campaign and clear heads that stopped the process. While some of the development would have been cool to see, I'm incredibly grateful we didn't go down that path https://www.wbur.org/news/2015/07/27/why-boston-olympics-bid-failed https://www.wbur.org/news/2015/07/27/why-boston-olympics-bid...

lifefeed 4y ago
I was still living in Boston in 2015, and I happy to see my city put a stop to that. We still have collective PTSD from the Big Dig, and we can identify a "over-promises and under-delivers" from a mile away.
- azemetre 4y ago
  Calling the big dig ptsd is delusional. The big dig probably increased real estate values in the tens of billions. Not to mention the health aspects of less pollution from cars and all the new businesses/restaurants created.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    PTSD is hyperbolic obviously. But it was pretty bad to live through and I didn't even live in the city. And it was hugely over budget and schedule. Fortunately, thanks to Tip O'Neill the rest of the country at least paid most of the bill. Thanks for that! But, at the end of the day, it was a huge improvement for Boston even if traffic is still mostly pretty bad. Just getting rid of the elevated highway to reconnect downtown to the North End is a big improvement for the city--as is airport access which was pretty ridiculous before.
  - throwaway0a5e 4y ago
    Giving the big dig credit for an economic revitalization that happened to damn near every city over the same time period is disingenuous at best. Money spent ensuring that some jerk in his apartment downtown didn't have to look at a highway is money not spent improving the T or fixing other highway problem points for a sum total of the same or better economic effect. Making transit options not suck increase property values regardless of how you make them. It's the results that matter. Green Monster V2 that yielded the same transit times between various points would have had the same economic effect. And this ignores the fact that the state let all sorts of infrastructure go into disrepair over the course of the project and we're still digging out of that hole.

sizzzzlerz 4y ago

When it comes to building up the winning countries infrastructure in support of hosting the games, it always, always is about ultimately feeding that money into the pockets of the rich and the connected. It doesn't matter whether the country is first world or third world, the same people are the winners every single time and the poor, the losers. The olympics are the world's largest and longest running Ponzi scheme.

Bayart 4y ago
I wish people stopped using « Ponzi scheme » for anything and everything. It is not a Ponzi scheme. And even if it were, it probably wouldn't be the largest.
DocTomoe 4y ago
Yep, the subways, the streets, the parks, the new apartments, the sports venues, that all only benefits the rich and the connected. Calm your horses, Mr. Marx.

lucraft 4y ago

At the time I calculated that if all the money spent on the 2012 Olympics (supposedly to inspire a nation's children to love sport) was instead given as endowments, then every single secondary school in England would receive something like £150,000 a year extra in their budget to spend on sport - in perpetuity.

pg_bot 4y ago

I think it is likely that the Olympics will move to a permanent location or a rotation of host cities in the future. Most local governments and populations have realized that building the infrastructure for the games is a losing proposition. The process for bidding is ripe for local and international corruption and the IOC vacuums up all of the profits.

mschuster91 4y ago
I'd rather guess that, similar to FIFA World Cups and F1 races it will be mostly a rotation between the dictatorships that can pay the most. There aren't many democracies left willing to pay for either of these mega events (or in case of F1, the starting fees for the teams), but there will always be a decent supply of dictatorships or oil sheiks wishing to white-wash their image and a supply of delegates/decisionmakers who can be bribed appropriately.
- lesstyzing 4y ago
  4/22 F1 races are in 'dictatorships'. Two of chose races have existed for many years (10-20 years). Doesn't seem like there's been a rush to dictatorships based on that. Apart from Qatar (and arguably Russia) World Cup's, including the one after Qatar don't appear to have been held in dictatorships at all.
- notahacker 4y ago
  The next two Olympics are being held in Paris and Los Angeles. The oil sheikdom World Cup is being followed by one shared between the US, Canada and Mexico. Formula One added events in Miami, Holland and Portugal to the calendar recently along with lomg standing events in several other democracies plus some petrostates and China. The idea that democracies aren't interested in hosting major sporting events isn't based in reality.
  - mschuster91 4y ago
    > The idea that democracies aren't interested in hosting major sporting events isn't based in reality. It's based on all of the contra-Olympic/WC movements that tend to crop up and successfully prevent any talks as soon as even rumors begin floating around. > plus some petrostates and China Out of the last 20 years worth of additions to the F1 calendar, we have Jeddah (Saudi-Arabia), Doha (Qatar), Baku (Azerbaijan), Sochi (Russia), Abu Dhabi (UAE), Istanbul (Turkey), Singapore, Bahrain and Shanghai (China) - which means 17 new tracks, of which nine are in a dictatorship of one or another kind. That's just way too much appeasing to bribery for me.

lesstyzing 4y ago

I'm not sure I understand this. The Olympics certainly massively improved certain areas. Hackney Wick has went from a handful of warehouses and junkyards to having a brand new train station, lots of new apartment blocks, bars and restaurants. Stratford and the Olympic's area between it and Hackney Wick has also seen massive development. Expecting this development to come with stacks of council housing is unfortunately naive. London obviously has big issues when it comes to affordable housing but using that to discredit the huge amount of development that came about because of the Olympics is silly.

rayiner 4y ago
How is it a good thing that employment places for working class people were replaced with housing and entertainment for yuppies?
- jimmytidey 4y ago
  Lots of (formerly) less affluent people owned houses in the area and now live close to much better facilities than they did before. Nothing 'yuppie' about a nice park, Westfield shopping centre or a train station?
  - ghaff 4y ago
    Gentrification and redevelopment has winners and losers. But I'm not sure the answer is to just let low income, rundown neighborhoods rot instead.
- simonh 4y ago
  The working class people weren't "replaced", any that did leave just sold their houses to Yuppies. Many of them may have just became Middle Class. Or just now live in a much nicer area. Perish the thought.
- lesstyzing 4y ago
  A lot of the businesses were already struggling (as per the article) and given the 'death of the high street' and the pandemic, probably would have died anyway. It unfortunate, but natural, that if you improve an area with newer housing and amenities that different people will move in and lots of businesses will no longer be required while other types of businesses will be required.

DocTomoe 4y ago

I don't get the "abandoned venues" line. There are successful post-olympic uses - for starters, the Munich olympic park is still a major meeting area, and is still used for sports. It's Olympic village is a great place to live at (disclaimer: I did), both for homeowners as well as for students. I hear similar news from the Barcelona olympic venues. Maybe it is not the Olympics to blame when your city is failing it's post-olympic legacy, but your city (and thus: your fellow citizens)?

jbjbjbjb 4y ago
The article isn’t saying the venues were abandoned but more that they didn’t fulfil the promises on affordable housing.

whywhywhywhy 4y ago

What a surprise, exactly what we said would happen happened. Honestly The Olympics is a truly disgusting farce when you dig into the realities of it and the absurd committee demands.