OLYMPIC COSTS

[Gross]

he budget for the 2012 London Olympics has risen to £9.35bn, Culture Secretary Tessa Jowell has told MPs.

The revised budget is nearly four times the £2.4bn estimate when London's bid succeeded less than two years ago.

[rosalind]

A hidden joy of the Olympics every time...

[johnloguk]

At times like this I fluctuate madly between contempt for Government incompetence and contempt for the degree to which the private sector sees Government contracts as a bottomless pit of money!

I have first hand experience of both

I still think the Olympics will be a fantastic event, but there are too many people making too much money out of the rest of us here

[distracted]

If they'd looked at the figures for the 2004 and upcoming 2008 olympics, surely they would have immediately come up with a more realistic figure?

Quick googling shows the 2004 Athens Olympics cost upwards of 11 billion euro after an initial 3 billion estimate. and the beijing olympics have a budget of around £20 billion. So quite obviously the initial £2.4 billion figure was never going to get anywhere near the mark... why quote something so low in the first place when you know there's not a chance you can bring the Olympics in on that sort of budget? There's no way for the figure other than up

[johnloguk]

I agree that the initial quote was ridiculously low. I've just heard the same figures mentioned for Athens and Beijing. But Athens included a brand new metro system and Beijing are building a brand new airport.

[rosalind]

Maybe they slipped some Olympic money aside in order to assist the additional construction of the its-going-to-look-horrendous Twickenham stadium.
That must equal the costs (and general workload) behind an Athens metro and a Beijing airport.

[Kitch]

I prefer my taxes to be spent in this way than on destroying the lives of Iraquis

[Red Adder]

Or spending £ 20 bn on a Trident replacement - hey we could do the London lympix, do it again 2016 in Glasgow to keep othe parts of the UK happy and still have £ 1 bn left to pay for a PFI hospital.

[ryeland of doom]

Or spending £ 20 bn on a Trident replacement - hey we could do the London lympix, do it again 2016 in Glasgow to keep othe parts of the UK happy and still have £ 1 bn left to pay for a PFI hospital.

Its not a choice... We get whacked for both!

What worries me is the plundering of other pots to pay for the Olympics. Is the only athletic discipline that is going to get funded going to be the running around a stadium variety? It is very possible that there may be further cuts to funding sports that will not feature in 2012.

[tomtom]

They should put orienteering in the olympics. It's not exactly an expensive sport...save them money if they ditched some other sport aswell!