At Guardian Comment: An Olympic Walk

I did the walk on Saturday. This piece went live yesterday:

On Saturday I did what all self-respecting London Olympics sceptics do: I walked round the site of the Olympic Park adjoining Stratford and pondered the wild folly of it all.

There was plenty to confirm my view: the glossy billboard adhered to the wooden perimeter fence explaining at great, resource-consuming length the environment-friendliness of its forthcoming electrified wire successor; the insistence of a guard near the security centre that I cease photographing the images of joyful, Olympics-inspired fellow Londoners adorning its surrounds; my calculation that half the 2012 track finals would be easily completed within the space of the few minutes I spent contemplating the fawn moonscape of the site itself, where the stadium will take the best part of four years to build.

Can the Games possibly deliver on their promises? Everything conspired to fortify my doubts. Delusional in their ambitions and absurd in their expense, the 2012 Games will surely fail to inspire a generation of British coach potatoes to run, jump or synchronize swim and fail too to bring prosperity to the capital’s east end.

But as my long trudge took me along the Greenway – an optimistically-named nature trail from which the illustrious Diamond Geezer reports every month - a countervailing sentiment took hold. Dignify it as a refusal to follow the crowd or call it plain contrary, I found a part of me rebelling against the growing cast of Olympics doomsayers. Some of its higher-profile members are simply drawlingly dismissive of the very idea of sport. Others have political motives. Compared with such comfortable negativity the shining, perhaps hopelessly romantic optimism of Sebastian Coe can seem rather attractive.

And I’ve a more practical reason for hoping that the Games live up to their organisers’ rhetoric. It is that they are happening on my own doorstep. My walk began and ended two-and-a-half hours later at my own front door. Boundlessly upbeat promotional literature about “Your Park” tumbles through that door’s letterbox at regular intervals. A large photograph of London’s first hosting of the Olympiad in 1908 adorns a corridor of my local sports hall. Soon after Mayor Boris Johnson performs his hotly-anticipated flag-waving at the Beijing Games’ closing ceremony, my local authority and those of east London’s other “Olympic boroughs” will embark in earnest on the task of converting their school pupils to the joys of athletic endeavour and encouraging their job-seekers to train up as potential Olympian plumbers and electricians.

How am I supposed to respond? Should I join the great intellectual mourning for the loss of Carpenters Road, the winding, twilight avenue of workshops and warehouses that once connected Stratford to Leyton, or warm to the soaring ambitions of the Olympics evangelists, if only for their mad naivety? Which course would offer the greatest rewards? Four years (and more) of unadulterated spiritual opposition or a resolve to recognize and, if possible, encourage, such benefits to my neighbourhood and its people as I can detect?

The answer can only be the latter. I am, after all, stuck with the Games whether I like them or not. And maybe it’s a little more than just making the best of a bad job. I can, with an effort, empathise with the Seb Coes of this world in their immersion in whatever has survived of the Olympic dream. I recall the day, many years ago, when my searing sprint finish took me past the school bully to win my school’s under-13s cross-country: a personal triumph over physical exhaustion but also a moral victory. Sport’s improving qualities are often glibly overstated, but they do have that capacity. The same is true of the whole 2012 Games lunacy. There’s nothing for it but to cheer up and hope for the best possible result. Sport is so marvelous and stupid in that way.

Here too.