London Olympics: value for money?

Not value for money if living in East London because just imagine the increased council taxes for many years to come to pay for a 3 week event.

To quote another correspondent in another discussion: "No."

What intrigues me is the neat symmetry of the miscalculation of the cost: it was meant to be £2.9bn, but then re-estimated at £9.2bn.... Conspiracy? Surely not....

All sense went out of the window when Coe and his cronies launched their Olympic programme. Nobody seemed to pay attention to the fact that there's only ever been one Olympics which didn't saddle taxpayers with a massive ongoing debt burden and that was Los Angeles (1984) which was blatantly sold to the likes of Coca Cola et al, at a time when Cold War jingoism was at its height.

It would have been wise for the Olympic Committee to have been placed under a surcharge obligation from the outset, to ensure that cost estimates were more reliable and taxpayers insulated from the fall-out. How utterly stupid were they not to realise that the land upon which the Olympics were to be sited would require exhaustive cleaning, for instance? A lot of people could have told them about that beforehand - London's legacy of industrial filth, not to mention all the military chemicals tested and dumped there.

I'd bet any amount of money that in about 20 years from now, the Olympic site will be a derelict graffiti'd wasteland and still sucking in taxpayers' money to treat its various problems.

It's a no from me too. I cannot see that the enormous cost will be recouped nor that will there be a 'legacy' in east London. I really don't get the hype and excitement that the Olympic committee is working to generate and just see the whole event as being an enormous hastle for anyone living (or heaven forbid trying to travel) in London and the South East.