IT’S disarming how often what may seem like a good idea when you wake up in the morning degenerates into a nightmare by bedtime. As we are being increasingly made aware, there are now six months to go before the athletics circus comes to town. Not ours, fortunately, or we’d be swamped.

I have to admit that I’m feeling ever-more relieved that after 35 years of London living, I decided to repatriate myself to the peace of this Island home. The track record of previous modern Olympic city hosts makes such uneasy reading that you have to question the motives of pursuing the dream of basking in a two-week vanity project over the reality of unaffordable expense, disruption and a legacy of debt and disappointment.

The scars inflicted on Montreal, Barcelona and Athens are still writ large. (We’ll never know about Beijing, though the least said about the background to that one, the better.)

It’s all the sadder given that there are huge benefits to be gained from international sporting and cultural exchange. You only need to listen to the howls of disappointment that greeted the slashing of the local sports grants to understand how people value such opportunities. The problem is that once an ideal becomes a commodity to be bought and sold, the rot sets in and incidentals take precedence over what the marketing gurus call the core activity.

Attempts to ‘brand’ the 2012 Olympic Games have led to many names being thrown at it – ‘the people’s games’, and, more bizarrely, ‘the public transport games’. Presumably it’s on the grounds that as a result of all the travel restrictions that will be in place in an already cramped city environment, the only way to get to competition venues will be by public transport.

Who can forget Mayor Boris’s big red London bus taking centre stage at the closing ceremony in Beijing? Well, think again. Transport for the public is likely to be the biggest casualty. If the organisers had been serious, the provision of public access would have been the first item on their shopping list after the hysteria over securing the event had evaporated.

Every day, ten million souls squeeze onto the capital’s Tube trains and buses alone. Add to that the sporting equivalent of the London Marathon, FA Cup Final and Wimbledon every day for two sweaty weeks in July and you have the recipe for meltdown.

To add insult to injury, athletes, officials and hangers-on will be whisked from their air-conditioned central London oases along discrete traffic lanes, while those living close to the competition venues will be forbidden to park near their homes.

Every day comes further evidence of ‘reality-slip’ from the increasingly capricious organisers. Last week there were suggestions that commuters should work from home for the duration, or even ‘go to the pub’ to avoid the crush! Too bad that in the real world, people – the non-sponsored variety – have a living to earn and small business have to operate to survive. An imposed holiday simply to accommodate an inconvenience, however extravagant, is hardly an option at a time of austerity.

At least in the case of London, it would appear that the venues, arenas and accommodation will be ready on time. But serious questions have arisen over the administration. There has already been an embarrassing fiasco over the issuing of tickets, the budget has been manipulated more thoroughly than muscles on a massage-table, the associated ‘cultural Olympiad’ has encountered fierce criticism for its money-gobbling appetite, and the proposed legacy of the Olympic Park facilities is in dispute.

Experience from previous host nations demonstrates that there are few long-term economic benefits. Indeed, for London there are dire predictions that 2012 could actually see the ‘normal’ tourist revenue seriously depleted because of prospects of overcrowding and heightened security. It’s affecting advance bookings for theatres and restaurants, although there are likely to be few tears shed on behalf of the hoteliers who inflated prices early only to discover that the fish are not biting.

It’s a factor which is even causing concern among those with heightened commercial expectations from the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee pageant. They call it ‘contagion’. In fact, apart from the Chinese manufacturers of all the souvenir tat, the only beneficiaries appear to be the package holiday trade catering for locals beating a fortnight’s retreat to a distant holiday beach.

While the five interlocking Olympic rings symbolise inter-continental connection and peaceful multi-national rivalry, the premise of the modern games, as conceived by Baron de Coubertin more than a century ago, was that competition should be between individuals, not countries. Two world wars and megatons of hubris later, jingoism oils the wheels of the Olympic movement, as each successive host succumbs to staging an even more extravagant event than its predecessor, with ritualised glitzy opening and closing ceremonies which have little to do with the athletic focus of the Games. It sorely detracts from the true inspiration of the competition – namely, the prowess of the athletes who have trained selflessly over years and have given their all to achieve excellence for themselves and, yes, to get the opportunity to drape their successes in their national flags.

So there’s a lot at stake. Already elements of the press, keen to exploit the event for sensational headlines, have planted the expectation of security scares, drug-taking and cheating, while building up national personalities whom they will just as summarily humiliate if they fade along the way.

In the current crazy atmosphere of ‘flip-flop’ honours, I wouldn’t mind
betting that there’s one ennobled former track athlete desperately clinging on to his ermine, in case the press and politicians bay for him to be stripped of it if Team GB underperforms.