WE SHOULD give the 2012 Olympic Games to the French. It’s not too late for London to pull out. Hand them the whole messy business on a plate: the chaos and traffic mayhem of construction, the panic over delays, the cost overruns, the political chicanery and the inevitable deficit to be inherited by London’s taxpayers.

We should give it to the French, first, because they want it so badly. The report published this week by the International Olympic Committee on the bids notes that Londoners are less enthused about an Olympic invasion. An IOC opinion poll showed that 84 per cent of Parisians wanted the Games compared with 68 per cent of Londoners.

If almost a third of Londoners are indifferent or opposed to an Olympic jamboree, it may be because, unlike Parisians, we don’t believe all the nonsense about government-directed economic regeneration. We don’t believe that the construction of a velodrome and a kayak slalom course will transform the Lea Valley from sleepy backwater into an economic furnace.

Nor do we believe that the billions pumped into a small bit of East London will engender a sporting renaissance, lifting Britons from the couch and into gyms. After decades of neglect, including the sale of school sports fields to housing developers, the Government’s affectation of interest in athletic prowess is hardly credible.

The real nagging doubt is about the money and the sufficiency of the £2.4 billion package that the Government has cobbled together to make the bid look credible. Of course, there is a lot of ballyhoo about how a billion pounds will be generated from new lotteries, and Ken Livingstone, the Mayor, has kindly promised to raise £550 million by increasing the council tax, but there is little reason to believe it will end there. The Government has no track record of competence in managing large public works projects, either directly or via part-privatised agencies. The Millennium Dome was a taster of the potential for embarrassment but a project so grand and so public as the Olympics cannot be allowed to fail.

For that reason, the IOC has achieved the extraordinary: it has extracted a blanket guarantee from the Chancellor, Gordon Brown, something no minister in the Cabinet has been able to secure. While health authorities are forced into ever more complex off-balance sheet arrangements to finance basic medical facilities, the Olympics are to get a blank cheque. I quote from the London 2012 bid document: “The Chancellor of the Exchequer has guaranteed that the UK Government will act as the ultimate financial guarantor should there be a shortfall between Olympic costs and revenues.”

A licence for any contractor employed on a London Olympic project to dig in his heels and delay, delay, delay.

Where could this lead? Look no further than Athens where the Finance Ministry indicated that the final cost of last year’s Greek Games is likely to be some €9 billion (£6 billion), almost double the original €4.6 billion budget and the most expensive Games ever. The consequences for Greece have been catastrophic, pushing the public deficit to more than 6 per cent of GDP last year.

Britain’s much larger economy can more easily absorb a public works project such as the Olympics, compared with a ramshackle Mediterranean economy. More interesting is evidence provided by Greece that the Games, widely hailed as a sporting and entertainment success, failed to generate much extra tourism, the main economic justification for the event.

Greece is now hamstrung by a bill it can ill afford, and the question is whether Londoners wish to follow the Greek example or hand over the burden of mounting this costly and, let’s face it, not always entertaining sports extravaganza to someone else.

The total capital investment envisaged for the Olympics is almost £9 billion but some £6 billion relates to road and rail projects, such as the East London Line, which the Government says are committed investments and will go ahead even if London’s bid for the Games does not succeed. Why, then, add the extra burden of building a large bicycle shed on wasteland?

But the real reason to give the event to Paris is because the Games are an anachronism, a grandiose, overblown piece of nationalism based on the notion that only vast public works can generate economic and social progress. Since the disastrous event staged in Montreal in 1976, the Games have been shown to be mainly a burden, not a boon, to their sponsors. The few exceptions, notably the Los Angeles, or “Coca-Cola”, Games, were criticised for lacking Olympic spirit.

Paris is therefore well suited to this sort of event – a city, like Athens, living on past glories and run by a government more than willing to tax its citizens heavily for the privilege of hosting the circus. What is most notable about the French bid is the lack of pretence at raising large amounts of capital from lotteries. The construction cost of the Paris Olympics will be financed from the public purse.

There is, of course, an alternative to Olympian economics. The IOC should run the Games as an enterprise. The organisation already derives royalties from the use of its name and logo but it should go further and set itself up as a business, running the Games for profit, with any dividends being paid out to its shareholders, the national Olympic committees. The IOC would be able to host the events in any city, renting the best sporting facilities from municipalities, regardless of national interest.

It would be a private franchise, a bit like the Miss World contest. It would be about sport, not politics, and it would pay its way.

carl.mortished@thetimes.co.uk

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