Do you think the economy will be more stable when the 2012 Olympics comes around?

If not, is it not going to cripple the UK, or London at least? Am I just thinking too far into it? I mean, when all the bidding was going on a while back, I remember reading that out of all the cities which have hosted the Olympics, only 3 have made actually profit!

So after we’ve spent £12 billion + on hosting it, and ripping up our countryside, aren’t we just going to be even worse off?

Reading this kind of stuff just seems to cement the worry:

The Athens Olympics, which cost a record £9.4bn to stage (way over its original budget, which rocketed after the September 11 terrorist attacks increased security costs) have left Greece groaning under a huge debt. In the months after the Games, the shortfall amounted to €50,000 for each Greek household, and taxpayers are still footing the bill. Maintenance of the sites alone has cost as much as £500m. “We didn’t find a plan for the post-Olympics development of the venues,” Fani Palli-Petralia, a New Democracy politician, said recently. “When a city gets the Games, it should make a business plan for big changes and then decide what the country needs for the day after the Olympics. This did not happen.”

So, learning from Greece’s mistake, you’d think it’s not going to be so bad if there’s a solid plan for what’s going to be done with all the Olympic buildings & venues after the Olympics is done? But then, from the same article:

Boris Johnson has warned that there was no “legacy masterplan” for the Olympic venues, saying it was pointless ploughing money into the Olympic site if no one knew “what on earth we’re trying to achieve”. Earlier this year, a committee of MPs accused Lord Coe and the 2012 team of lacking foresight and spending money “like water”. And, last month, a government survey showed that participation in sport in London was falling. And the budget for the 2012 Games has soared from £3.4bn to £9.3bn.

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