London 2012 less about beating Beijing than being there

ATHLETICS:Maybe these Olympics are going to be less about the venues and more about the hysterical supporters in them generating the magic that was often absent in the Chinese capital, writes IAN O'RIORDAN

I RAN into Crazy Fitz during the week, told him I’d been over in London to check out the Olympic venues, and was not particularly impressed. Few people I know care less about these Olympics than Crazy Fitz, but still, he gave me that jowly look of obvious vindication.

“Tell ME about it,” he said. “Sure I lived in that part of the London, for a year. You couldn’t go near any of the pubs around there, or you’d end up in a brawl. And the only off-licence we trusted had steel bars in front of the counter. You knew he had a gun under there too.”

Truth is I’m more familiar with the blind alleys of Old San Juan than the streets of London – and was actually excited to get a feel for the place. Most of it was laid on too, courtesy of our friends at the Olympic Council of Ireland; less than 48 hours later the excitement had turned to fear, and not just of losing my map of the London Underground.

It probably didn’t help that I’d brought along John Healy’s The Grass Arena for bedtime reading. If there is a more savage tale of the Irish living rough in London then it’s not yet printed, because Healy writes like the messenger from hell, bleaker than bleak. He roamed among the homeless in London for 15 years, before an astonishing turn of events saved his life. If the Irish boxers need some of that crude motivation before next July then I can’t recommend The Grass Arena strongly enough.

“Woke up lying in a puddle of water at the bottom of some iron stairs in the basement of a house. Got up as quickly as the stiffness in my body would allow. Climbed the stairs. No one around. Slid out onto the street . . . Limped over to the park. Lay across the seat. Start to doze off. Horrors again . . . I’ve got them bad . . . hundreds of rats, each threatening to bite before racing past. Kept spewing up. Didn’t even fancy a smoke. Fuck the drink.”

I can only imagine the parts of London where Healy often ended up, and they probably weren’t too far from where they’ve built the new 2012 Olympic Park – out in the old industrial east, around the Lower Lea Valley, an area even Dickens himself would have once found hideous. When the site was formally handed over the London Organising Committee, in July 2007, it was essentially a domestic and industrial landfill, some 250 acres of contaminated soil, criss-crossed with dozens of old electrical pylons.

In fairness, they’ve done an amazing job in transforming it – although that’s not saying it’s suddenly an amazing site, at least compared to more recent Olympic Parks. My first impression, approaching from West Ham station, was a bit like going back to Funderland as an adult, when you’d already been to Disneyland as a kid.

The inevitable danger here is comparing the London venues with Beijing, four years ago.

From the very outset London were adamant that no way were they competing with Beijing – even if their eventual Olympic budget is now in danger of surpassing the €13 billion mark.

How could they? What they built in Beijing weren’t just Olympic venues but works of art – especially the spectacular masterpiece that became known as the Bird’s Nest. Built with 110,000 tons of steel, wrapped around red concrete walls, when lit up at night it glowed like an enormous red egg inside its nest. It was a marvel of engineering and imagination that no other country would have the nerve – or money – to imitate, and no matter how many times I walked in and out of that stadium four years ago that sense of awe never diminished.

London’s main Olympic Stadium – apparently becoming known as the Toilet Bowl – reminded me a little of that old ride in Funderland known as the Hully Gully, at least from a distance. (We weren’t allowed inside, for security reasons.) Built with just 10,000 tons of steel, it’s definitely the lightest Olympic arena in modern times, and its main attraction really is its simplicity, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Most of us like to eat our cornflakes from a plain white bowl.

Right next to the Olympic Stadium they’ve built The Orbit, a sort of artistic viewing tower which unfortunately does look like a half-collapsed rollercoaster. Next to that is the aquatics centre, not that you’d realise that from the outside – and it really does pale in comparison to Beijing’s beautiful Water Cube, which was brilliantly covered in transparent bubbles and actually changed colour over the course of the day and night.

To the other side of the Olympic Stadium is the velodrome, plus the basketball arena. the velodrome does look great, even though it’s become known as The Pringle, but the basketball arena looks like it might suddenly blow down. That’s probably because it is only temporary, the outer plastic walls removable when the five-ringed circus has moved on.

Just beyond that is the Olympic Village, where they were actually unloading the last of the flat-pack furniture for this week’s opening deadline. Built in 11 blocks, providing 2,818 apartments, and housing 16,000 beds, it was clearly modelled on something they’d seen off the M50.

Then, just when it seemed my Olympic Park tour was already at an end, another central structure was pointed out – this one the largest McDonald’s ever built. At 3,000 square metres, it too will be temporary, and come next July will be serving around 50,000 Big Macs, 100,000 portions of fries and 30,000 milkshakes – and that is impressive, by any standards. No doubt Usain Bolt will be a regular customer again too.

After that it was back to the London Underground for another test run on the Tube. The less said about this particular experience the better, but if it’s stuffy and nauseating and brutally exhausting at four o’clock on a Thursday in March what’s it going to be like at rush hour next July?

Eventually it was out to Gatwick, where I met up with some of the Irish Olympic officials who had spent the day at the British Swimming Championships, one of the first major test events of the Olympic venues. They’d only let a limited amount of people in, but the atmosphere, reportedly, was incredible

That got me thinking that maybe these Olympics are going to be less about the venues and more about the people in them, the caring and knowing audiences there to appreciate the athletes and not the surroundings, that can create the sense of thrill and magic that was often absent from Beijing. If crowds of hysterical partisan supporters ultimately define the Olympics maybe even Rio will have a hard act to follow four years from now.