The major sports to emerge since London was awarded the Olympic Games have been carping and whingeing, not least about the possible cost of the enterprise. This is, unfortunately, not novel. Almost every democracy that has hosted the Games in the past three decades has endured cynical attacks in advance, but for most of them the event itself has proved a triumph.

There is every reason to believe that this will be true for London when 2012 finally arrives. The designs for the principal Olympic stadium, published yesterday, have been produced well ahead of time and construction will start many months ahead of schedule. The same has occurred for many other crucial aspects of preparation. The International Olympic Committee has been unstinting in its praise for the manner in which the organisers have moved forward since London won the prize. Their expert assessment should count for rather more than criticism, which, if it were heeded, would mean that Britain never embarked on major development projects of any kind. The Olympics are unreservedly a beneficial opportunity for Britain, in general, and London, in particular.

The sniping means that the stadium's design is unlikely to meet with universal approval. Even those more sympathetic to Lord Coe and his colleagues might have wished for a slightly more spectacular building with something akin to an arch or somesuch — instead, it seems we have a monument to Tupperware. Those in charge of this project are entitled to retort, however, that it is strange for the sceptics to demand both that expenditure on the event is kept down and that the stadium includes expensive architectural innovations. That said, a little more creativity would have been a bonus

With luck, the stadium will be more breathtaking when built than it appears now. Its defining feature is an extraordinary device described as a “fabric curtain” wrapped around the whole stadium and protecting spectators. This should have the technological capacity to be far more than a means of cloaking the seating. Parts of it could include an immense plasma screen with constantly altering images and replays of the action that has occurred in the stadium.

A legitimate area of inquiry is what happens to the stadium after 2012, not before or during it. The current scheme proposes that there be only 25,000 permanent seats with 55,000 others that could be removed relatively easily once the Games and the Paralympics have been finished.

This is, potentially, an unconvincing proposal. A 25,000-seat stadium would be too small to be the new home for a Premier League football club such as West Ham United, but rather too large to be filled reliably basis by a smaller outfit such as Leyton Orient. Those in charge of the Games contend that this does not matter, as the stadium would find life as the base for British athletics in future. Yet it is not obvious that such a base is needed and, even if it is, that 25,000 is the ideal number of seats for it either.

On balance, the model followed in Manchester where the stadium built for the Commonwealth Games has become Manchester City's ground appears to an appropriate precedent. There is, though, plenty of time before the Games close to decide how to use the stadium after the cheers have ceased to echo.