CITIUS ALTIUS FORTIUS
I remember when it was announced that England had won the race to hold the 2012 Olympic Games, my French friends said 'Thank God' and my English friends said 'Oh God' and it would appear the early prophesies are coming true. So far the budget stands at a staggering £9.3 billion. £9.3 billion? It looks like a typo, doesn't it? If I hit the nought button correctly this figure reads as £9,300000 000000 (I think!) and we are still five years away from the opening. I'm wondering whether they shouldn't be christened the Googol Games as the zeros just seem to be added on in a pretty willy-nilly fashion.
Much of the money is coming out of the Lottery (yet another stealth tax), so many projects that were hoping for Lottery financing are now quietly moving to the back burner. I am all for the Games, don't get me wrong, but I cannot honestly see how such a budget is justified, especially when one reads in the English press the measures being taken by the latest penny-pinching government to save a few quid. Only today in the Telly there was an article that refuse should only collected once a fortnight. What are they trying to do - bring back the Plague? Walk through any town in England the night before the refuse is collected - the bins are overflowing and if the litter was bagged, it has been torn apart by foxes.
With a bit of foresight, what a shame the 2012 Games were not held jointly by France and England. By 2009 the railway link between London and Paris will hopefully be finished so the travelling distance between the two cities has never so fast. We don't have to have all the atheletes in one place all together - the Winter Olympics in Turin were an example of this. We could have had the opening ceremony in London and the closing ceremony in Paris and shared out the various competitions between the two countries.
I reckon that if there were a referendum in England as to whether England should go ahead with the Games, I imagine a lot of people would vote for giving the French £5,000000 000000 to take it off their hands!
