"The bid," said Jerome Frost, head designer of the Olympic Delivery Authority (ODA), "was positioned on what we would leave behind. Touted as the "Legacy Olympics" (and at $14.8 billion, a bargain compared to Sochi's reported $51 billion cost), these games would be, promised then Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, "a force for regeneration," a chance to address East London's maladies. It would use the games to jump-start the renewal of East London, the historically wrong-side-of-the-tracks part of the city that by any measurement-income, unemployment, life expectancy, health-sits at the bottom of the social and economic barrel. Olympi-philes may remember that when London squared off against Paris to vie for the right to host the 2012 Summer Games, the deal clincher was this: London would not merely celebrate sport. Though it may be too early to sum up the Sochi effect, other than hotels-built-while-you-wait, " bars that look like dentists' offices" (in the words of a New York Times reporter), and tweeted photos of communal toilets, a postmortem of the 2012 Summer Games held in London and earlier venues can be done. On to the next town- Rio de Janeiro in 2016.
Another bank vault full of gold medals awarded.