Olympics

Sebastian Coe’s office, on the twenty-third floor of the Barclays Building in Canary Wharf, is backed by a glass wall, through which you can gaze out across a panoramic view of east London. As chairman of the 2012 organising committee (LOCOG), Coe is the man at the centre of the greatest sporting event to ever come to London, as well as spearheading the dramatic redevelopment of one of the most neglected parts of our city. It’s a big enough responsibility in itself, but the recent controversy over the spiralling costs of the event, as well as concerns about whether building work will finish on time – despite a glowing progress report from the recent visit by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) – means that the pressure to deliver a successful Games is mounting. Not that you’d know it. Dressed in a dusky pink shirt, Coe exudes calm – and charm – only reminding you of his own Olympic gold-medal past as he bounds with wiry energy up to the roof of the building for our photoshoot. But once there, with the vast Olympic site spread before him, you can’t help but think of the enormous task that lies ahead. We asked Lord Coe the questions that urgently need answering…
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How will the average Londoner benefit from these Games?
‘When, 30 years ago, those of us involved in sport were trying to point out that London was a Third World city in terms of sporting facilities, magazines such as yourselves and others, just sat on your hands and didn’t do anything. We are being asked about participation by people who wouldn’t have crossed the road to support those causes previously. The number one legacy indisputably will be proper facilities that communities can use. I’m not talking about the Wimbledons or Wembleys. I’m talking about facilities where people can train and develop the next generation. It’s a joke that London only has one 50-metre swimming pool; it’s a joke that London has survived with the circa-1960s track and field facilities at Crystal Palace.

‘Number two: if you look at rates of health-related activity, you have pockets that are really unresponsive to that, pockets of deprivation and pockets of ill health. The Games will raise those rates of activity. The boroughs are already responding with programmes of sporting inclusion. The other issue is that the Games is a focus of creativity, so the Olympic cultural festival that will kick off next year, when the Mayor brings the flag back to London from Beijing, is very important for us.’

From 2009 to 2012, £70 million in Lottery funding earmarked for local sports projects will be siphoned off for the Olympics. How will that boost local participation?
‘Whatever the displacement between 2009 and 2012, that’s not money going out of sport, it’s money that’s being put into the biggest platform we have to drive other things. But my view is that, over the course of the five years, our ability to bring business partners such as Lloyds TSB and, most recently, EDF Energy to the table will mean extra resourcing.’

But local facilities – such as the Waltham Forest pool – are closing.
‘That may be new to you, but it’s not new in British sport. For 30 years, British sport has had to make judgements about that. I was chairman of the UK Sports Council; I know how difficult these judgements are. If a pool has closed in Waltham Forest, that is not because of funding for the Games, that’s down to locally elected politicians and their judgement.’

Londoners want to know that Olympic facilities will be used after the Games, and they want to know that it won’t be at the expense of local facilities.
‘I’m not here to defend the running of facilities in London boroughs. But we have a commitment from the Mayor to fund the legacy to the tune of £10m a year and that is a contribution to the ongoing costs of the venues. The venues are designed so that they won’t be white elephants. If you look at the design of the Olympic athletics stadium, as much thought is being put into what its legacy is as what it looks like.’

Will there be public access to all those facilities? The Mayor of Newham recently said that leisure access to the aquatics centre was ‘in negotiation’?
‘There’s a balance. Of course you want young people swimming in pools, but don’t forget: at the recent World Championships and at Athens, there wasn’t a single swimmer from London. London is chronically short of swimming facilities; it is not chronically short of leisure pools. Of course there’s a balance between elite-level performance and participation, and that will be met. There is absolute commitment that there has to be a leisure component.’

The VeloPark’s smaller than promised, and some existing cycling facilities on the site will go. Cyclists will be worse off.
‘You’re talking about the Eastway cycle track, which my father used to race and train on in the 1930s. I am very comfortable that the legacy and needs of cycling in London are going to be much better served than they have been.’

Is it not embarrassing that cycling’s national body (British Cycling) has agreed that cyclists are losing out?
‘If you were to say to me: “Am I embarrassed about heading up a team that brought the Games to London and some of the best cycling facilities, that would not have been here had the Games not been here?”, I would say: “I’m not embarrassed – I’m absolutely delighted to be a part of that.” ’

Could these plans change?
‘There aren’t plans set in stone and there aren’t plans to change. It’s being worked on at the moment in conjunction with the Olympic Development Authority, British Cycling and the Eastway users.’

What would you say to the people who are losing their homes and businesses for what some of them have called ‘two weeks of sport’?
‘The vast majority of all those groups you’ve mentioned understand that it’s not “two weeks of sport”. This is about the regeneration of east London. These are five Olympic boroughs which are among the 11 poorest boroughs in the country, a fact that has not been of much interest to Londoners who have tended to view London as something that happens on the other side of Tower Bridge. Anyone who thinks we are promoting two weeks of sport is very ill-informed. If you speak to the businesses that have relocated, the facilities that they are now in are, in some cases, significantly better than the ones they’ve left. But if you say to me “Are you going to satisfy anyone all the time, and is short-term dislocation in balance with long-term regeneration?”, the answer is probably “No”. What we will leave behind is regeneration over the next 40 years. We’re talking about 40,000 new homes, 50,000 new jobs. If I’m being hard-nosed, it’s the kickstart this area needs.’

Regeneration doesn’t need sporting events. The Stratford Rail Link was being built anyway and Docklands was redeveloped without an Olympics.
‘Absolutely. But let me give you a good example: the Stratford Retail Development [a 150,000-square-metre town centre comprising three department stores and 120 shops and cafés] was brought forward three years in order to meet the Games’ deadline. We’re building an Olympic Village. Once the Games has gone, that is in place for immediate conversion into housing. Don’t tell me that that would have happened in that time frame had the Games not come to us. You’re right in one respect: you don’t need the Games to regenerate a city. But often, and in high-profile ways, both in Sydney and Barcelona, it was about the Olympics changing the nature of a challenging area of dockland.’

The Games haven’t led to successful regeneration in any of the recent Olympic cities, aside from Barcelona.
‘Many cities haven’t used the Games as a regenerator. But Athens has ended up with 150km of new or upgraded roads and a great transport system; Barcelona is the same. Sydney had a piece of contaminated land that’s now home to 43,000 people. Everyone suddenly becomes an instant expert on this but, if you go to Barcelona and ask town planners about the effect of the Games, it’s been profound.’

Given the logistics of mounting the event, wouldn’t it be better to rethink the Games so that there was one central international venue?
‘No. I think the Olympics is a global movement which should go around the world, and countries should be able to use it to do all sorts of things off the back of the event. I recognise in maintaining its global nature the Olympic movement will have to help countries that may not have the wherewithal to be able to do that; it has yet to go to South America, large parts of Asia and Africa, and we are thinking about how that could be done.’

What about the costs for London: will they continue to grow?
‘The Games aren’t escalating in cost. If you look at the core costs of the venues and the infrastructure that makes them work, that is in line with pre-Singapore estimates. What has increased is the bigger picture. Let me give you a good example: it isn’t strictly necessary to bury 52 pylons that cut the Olympic park in half. But it’s my hunch that when people are sitting in an aquatic centre they would rather do that without having them blot the landscape. It is certainly my belief that families, when they finally move into the Olympic Park, don’t want their kids playing in gardens with overhanging pylons. Now we could have left them there and had a perfectly acceptable Games. So is that an Olympic cost, or a value going forward for the community? The thing that has altered is the £2 billion extra that has gone into the regeneration of east London. The figure for council tax has not increased since Singapore and the Mayor is clear that it will not go beyond the 38p a week that was promised.’

How have you been affected by the media reporting of the Games so far?
‘You know something: I don’t care. There are experts and instant experts. The only experts who really matter are the experts on the IOC. They have just been through London and I choose their words rather than mine: they feel London is significantly ahead of any host city at this point both in detail planning and in legacy, and I am satisfied with that. I don’t have an issue with the media. It’s important that the media are forensic, but some of it is lazy journalism. That is the nature of the Olympic Games.’

We have to ask: what do you honestly think of the logo?
‘I am very pleased with it. You can’t assume that young people are going to be excited by an Olympic Games just because you tell them this is a great thing to be involved in. You need to speak to them in language they understand and with technology that’s familiar to them. If anybody thought London was going to come to the table with Beefeaters or Union flags or Angels of the North, they were wrong. We’re also the first city with a logo for both the Olympic and Paralympic organisations. And this has to sit as comfortably on a laptop, a mobile phone and a computer screen.’

Any insider tips on the mascot?
‘No: we haven’t even thought about it yet. We can’t reveal it until after Beijing.’

If the Olympics is a flop, London will be a laughing stock. How do you deal with that pressure?
‘First of all, I’ve broken 13 world records in my time; I don’t intend to break a fourteenth and be the first organiser of a Games to bring them in late. Of course we will have a fantastic Games. More than just organising a sporting event, I want to leave something of real lasting impact. We’ve gone a long way already towards starting that process. You’re asking me questions with five years to go that even cities as good as Sydney weren’t addressing a year before the Games. The legacy won’t fall into our lap. It won’t happen unless we plan now.’

No sleepless nights, then?
‘No, because you deliver in a structured way. This isn’t my project. It doesn’t belong to me, to the government, to the IOC or to the ODA, it belongs to the people of this country. I just spent last Saturday walking around London all day [the day of the Tour de France] and people get this. I walked across the bridge between Buckingham Palace and St James’s Park and I could have spent an hour talking to people about the Olympics because there is just so much excitement about it.’