Launched in Tokyo at the "Hearing Out the Anti-Olympics Case" press conference on 23rd July 2019:
olympicswatch.org

Today finally sees the re-opening of Lea Bridge Station, closed for the last 31 years. Trumpeted parenthetically last week in a tweet from the Standard's Ross Lydall as following a "£5m Olympic windfall".

Another transport titbit from 2012. This article showing that the number of passengers using London's buses declined during 2012 for the first time in over a decade slipped past Games Monitor's dedicated team!

Fancy a swim at the Aquatic Centre with your kids? Need to use the car park? Better be sure in that case you’ve got cash to feed the machine because it won’t accept a card.

Friends took their two children aged 12 and 8 for what they said was an enjoyable swim. Enjoyable, that is, until they had to go home. They had overrun the free hour’s parking so had to pay £1.50, a perfectly reasonable charge. Only problem was the machine only took cash and they didn’t have any. In most cases you can pay a parking charge by card and they went round the different machines to see which one took a card. But none did.

It's a question being asked more and more about the Olympics. $20billion? Is it really worth it? For three weeks? Yeah, it's a lot! What could we get for that money? Jobs, health care, elderly care, roads, education, homeless shelters, affordable housing... NoBostonOlympics videos of Bostonians talking back about lost opportunities, lack of transparency in the bid, thumbs down to Boston2024....

Popular London2012 miracle stories keep cropping up, often in an academic context. Recent examples were provided at the ongoing UEL seminars held at the LLDC headquarters in the poshly named Montfichet Road at Stratford City. The upmarket de Montfichet was a Norman baron who founded Langthorne Abbey in Stratford back in the early 12th Century. Another classy name thrown up by recent events to inject an estate agent inspired aristocratic ambience in the E20 zone is Chobham Manor, the new address of the former rather down at heel Clays Lane.

Tis the season to be jolly and publish utter bullshit about legacies it seems, it being one year on.

Emily Dugan provides an excellent example for The Independent, notably this one-liner

by Matthew Richmond

Protesters display a banner of Mayor Eduardo Paes and State Governor Sergio Cabral holding Rio de Janeiro’s famous Christ statue hostage. The banner below reads “Who gives the order? Who gets the progress?”

Did Boris have a favourite lilo he used to float around on when he was young? After his ‘Olympic legacy’ floating park on the Thames ‘sank’ into oblivion it seems he has been using bath time to dream up some more lilo type developments for the river and the Royal docks. Boris’ original idea was criticised by objectors as ‘an unwelcome intrusion’ into the river. The Port of London Authority was also unhappy and considered his watery park would be a ‘navigation hazard’. His new plan for homes floating in the Docks has been panned as a ‘Titanic mistake’ by London City Airport campaigner Alan Haughton who says ‘The Royal Docks contains the London City Airport Public Safety Zone - also called a crash zone. The Department for Transport strictly forbids development in a Crash Zone’.

Olympics inflation comes in all forms. The Home Office has released figures showing terrorism arrests rose by 60% in the year up to September 2012 by comparison with the previous year with a doubling of arrests in the period April - June almost doubling over the same period in 2011. Around 18% of the 245 arrested, 45, were charged with a terrorism-related offence of which 25 are still awaiting trial.