The fraught disputes over how best to recoup the high construction and maintenance costs of the London Olympic stadium conform to a pattern previously seen elsewhere in England and abroad. The story of the Don Valley stadium in Sheffield provides a cautionary tale of how the visionary delusions of ambitious politicians end up ruining the chances of ordinary people gaining adequate access to affordable opportunities for healthy recreation.

Usain Bolt is to get £500,000 for appearing at this summer's Olympics Anniversary event. Up till now Bolt has been the victim of 'punitive' tax laws which have prevented him earning these absurd sums in the past, but now the law has been changed to rectify this injustice! His British rivals, the likes of Ennis and Farah, will have to make do with a miserable £100,000 or so.

In a house in the London suburb of Ealing, hired for the occasion by a film company, an actor playing the part of an average guy, is checking in a mirror how he looks in his recently bought shirt. Out from behind the mirror steps the winner of the recent Olympic women’s heptathlon who reels off some spiel about a 2% discount. The actor/guy plays gobsmacked that this princess should emerge from behind his mirror, announce some cashback offer then humiliate him over his new shoes.

‘I think the Vitality programme is absolutely brilliant – everything I stand for is echoed in the values of Vitality.’ These are the inane words of Olympic heroine Jessica Ennis, now earning a fast buck as a ‘Vitality Ambassadress’ through which she will ‘participate in a number of marketing activities…which add value to the Vitality proposition’. Diplomatically, she continues ‘we all love to be rewarded for our hard work to get healthy…’

As has already been announced the elite annual London Grand Prix Diamond League meeting will be moved from Crystal Palace to the Olympic Stadium. To this was added an elite Paralympic event.

Forget about the importance of taking part. Rory McIlroy is in an uncomfortable position, on the horns of a dilemma. Should he play golf at Rio 2016 for the UK, apparently his preference, or Ireland? The Irish tried to help him make up his mind by offering to let him carry the flag, but this only seems to have added to the pressure so that now he may not play at all!

It's just another very small, very local Olympics legacy story about an Olympic bridge, a second Olympic bridge, across the Hackney Cut canal. The other, the first bridge crossed the canal from the Gainsborough Primary School in Hackney Wick and was used by school children to get to their playing fields at Arena Fields on the east side of the canal. That is it was until the ODA built over the playing fields and demolished the bridge. The plan was to build a new bridge which would rob residents of Wick Village, already suffering from the loss of the green space opposite their estate and the monstrous Media Centre erected in its place, of their canalside open space. That argument continues.

A little further south another Olympic bridge, the second bridge, impinges on another local community, the Eton Mission Rowing Club. The Club had already lost land to the Olympic Compulsory Purchase Order, for the construction of the bridge to allow access to the Olympic Park, making it harder to carry on its activities. Now the LLDC plans to make life even more difficult with plans to construct a lift next to the bridge, taking even more land belonging to the Club.

The Rowing Club has suffered rowing blight since 2005 with new rowers reluctant to join as a result of the uncertainty created by the threat of compulsory purchase and the loss of space to carry on its activities. Now, after one hundred and twenty-eight years of existence Eye on the Park recently reported the Club is warning it faces extinction at the present site if these latest plans are adopted.

"If they shorten the space we have to work in even more," Club secretary Tim Hinchliff said, "we’d be a club that couldn’t store and maintain an eight, and take it to regattas. Well that’s not a rowing club is it? They either have to change what they are doing with that bridge, or they have to move us somewhere else."

Promises, promises

"There's a direct link between elite success and participation in sport”

David Cameron 12 Aug 2012

"Mega-events, such as the Olympic Games, have often been described as a preferred tool of place promotion and marketing and a primary connection between the local and the global. The Olympics are a global spectacle literally taking place in a single locale. Olympic Games are tightly interwoven into the urban economy and (re-)development schemes. They are also an increasingly important driver in the creation of new leisure and consumption spaces and the interests of international property firms. Like all mega-events, the Olympics are almost exclusively urban phenomena that require large public and private investments."