Games Monitor

Skip to main content.

Economics

Retail therapy

Remarkably, refutation of the inevitable benefits of hosting the Games is considered within the Olympic planning documents (Retail, Leisure and Sport Impact Assessment Appendices, Appendix 4 to the Environmental Statement, January 2004) as part of an attempt to calculate the amount and type of retail floor space that the Games could support. The Atlanta Games of 1996 was a retail disaster.


|

Raiders of Pudding Mill Stadium

The Pudding Mill White Elephant just won't lie down. CoeLtd is still hoping to bring the 2017 IAAF World Athletics Championships to London. But it all depends on there being an available stadium. After all it's hard to hold an Athletics Championships without one. LoCoe has his own IAAF ambitions with the next milestone in 2015 when he hopes to succeed to the top job. The loss of a stadium could prove terminal to those ambitions.


| | | | | | | |

going for the burn

Dave Hill's been tweeting that he's found a couple of the people he's been interviewing around Clarence Rd who've made mention of lack of the fabled Olympics job opportunities as one of the underliers explaining our rioting. Although pop-up looting might perhaps be an expression more appropriate to the ears of those aspirational about the Olympiad?


| | | | |

Corrupt Olympic fantasies

The tourism disaster which is London 2012 is turning from a gale into a hurricane. Hotels, outraged by the price gouging being practised by LOCOG's partners Thomas Cook and CoSport, are withdrawing rooms from its preferential-rate scheme. A while back SCoeLtd blamed hotels for jacking up prices and threatening London's good name. However, hotels hit back accusing LOCOG and its partners of being behind the abominable inflation. At the heart of the matter is the undisclosed payment made by Thomas Cook and CoSport to LOCOG to become official resellers of these rooms. This kind of corruption lies at the heart of the Olympic system whereby a range of commercial organisations pay Organising Committees to gain monopolistic access to the Games. Price gouging was supposed to be outlawed at the 2012 Games. In reality it is central to the whole event.


| | | | | |

SebCo needs a living wage!

Remember that compact between TELCO and the London Olympic Committee in November 2004 when the Olympic Committee promised to pay the living wage? The one that was abandoned by the ODA in September 2006? And which the ODA said it 'would ask' its contractors to keep in March 2007? Which one in five workers then said in October 2010 they were not being paid?


| | | | | | |

Low 2012 prices show women's sport 'not valued equally'

The organisers of London's 2012 Olympics have been accused of undervaluing women's sports and contravening the Olympic Charter's commitments to equality. Sue Tibballs, chief executive of the Women's Sport and Fitness Foundation (WSFF) said: "There is no doubt it sends a clear message that women's sports are not valued equally.


| | |

North/south divide - South gets Olympic contracts

In 2005, when London won the 2012 Olympics, Seb Coe of Locog Ltd wrote "The London 2012 Games will provide a unique opportunity for businesses of all shapes and sizes across the UK, providing essential goods and services for this historic event." Unsurprisingly, as with most Olympic promises, the reality has turned out to be somewhat different.


| | | | | |

Delhi Commonwealth Blame Games

Looking at some recent stories in the Indian news media about the construction of the Commonwealth Games facilities it is apparent that the 'same old same old' influences of privatisation, poor institutional oversight, greed, corruption and the brutal exploitation of the vulnerable poor labouring on the project have been clearly highlighted for some time.


| | | | | | | |

Syndicate content