Olympics – Dreams and Legacies
The Xinhua News Agency trumpeted the success of the Beijing Olympics even before the end of the final ceremony. It said that the event showed China was friendly, harmonious and ‘respected all international rules.’ The true legacy of the Beijing Summer Olympics won’t be measurable for several years yet, but it won’t be quite as clear cut as Xinhua would have us believe.
Chinese Olympic Scandals
China’s tight control over domestic news hasn’t slackened. While those outside the country knew about the lip-syncing tot at the opening ceremony, this faux pas was kept from those inside China for several days, and the government’s grip on the media was revealed this autumn, when it became clear that the adulteration of Beijing’s infant milk supplies with toxic melamine had been known about before the games opened but was hushed up until the story broke outside China’s borders.
There isn’t scope in a single article to talk about the ambiguous effect of the Olympics on China’s fledgling and much oppressed human rights community. What is clear is that the environmental legacy of the games is already proving temporary. The traffic restrictions that operated during the games have been extended, but even so, pollution levels are climbing again, and there simply isn’t a policy underpinning the driving bans that remove certain classes of vehicles, or vehicles registered in certain places, from the roads for set days. As even China’s domestic market falters, we can expect to see the environment taking a back seat to fairly draconian measures to re-ignite the touch paper that fired China’s original economic rocket.
British Olympic Pressures
And where does this complex legacy leave the dreams of London 2012? It’s already under pressure, as small construction firms go out of business because larger firms are no longer sub-contracting work to them, preferring to hope that they can meet deadlines by giving their own workers more overtime. The economic Olympic torch is already flickering …
Worse news threatens to put the Olympic flame out all together, at least environmentally - the claim that 2012 will deliver ‘the greenest games ever’ is beginning to crumble at the edges, because the Olympic Delivery Authority (ODA) has a dual focus: it must deliver environmentally-friendly facilities but they must arrive on time and on budget … and that balancing act is already tipping to ‘on budget’.
As an example, water freight was vaunted as the best way to get materials to the East London sites because it’s less polluting and less congesting than lorries and there’s a highly convenient river: the Thames! But road freight prices have plummeted since the summer, so that they are now up to half the price of rail freight and one third of the price of water travel. So the ODA must weigh up whether to keep an average of seventeen lorries off the roads of London per load of freight, or save two-thirds of the cost by letting the wagons roll. At the moment the barges are still making their way to Stratford, but it’s likely that the pressure is on to keep road hauliers in business and costs down, and that’s bad news for those who have to cope with East London’s already packed and polluted road system.
London Olympic Torch photograph courtesy of Zoonaber at Flickr under a Creative Commons Licence
