The design of the showpiece Olympic stadium for London 2012 will be unveiled today and Games organisers hope that the brilliance of the look of their new baby will dull the noise of the doubters asking why it will cost so much and who is going to look after it once the Olympics have moved on.

The unveiling today, in a marquee on the site of the Olympic park where the stadium is to be built, is a big moment for London 2012, the first since the infamous logo launch earlier in the year. London 2012 hopes to astonish its audience again today, although this time with universal admiration for a stadium design that is not expected to be as radical as the logo that preceded it.

One of the terms doing the rounds in the London 2012 offices yesterday was that the design is a “blueprint” for future stadiums. The key design element is its ability to reinvent itself, switching from an 80,000-seat venue for the Olympics to a 25,000-seat one thereafter. After-use of the stadium and those 55,000 dismantled seats will thus be central to the story of the stadium, which is to be told today.

However, the story of cost will take some telling, too. One of the problems London 2012 appears to have faced was that, when the contract for the stadium was ready to be signed, there was only one bidder, Team McAlpine, there to sign it. This hardly left London 2012 in a position of strength to negotiate.

The obvious contrast is with the Emirates Stadium, home of Arsenal FC, which was built by the same construction company at less than half the cost. The Emirates Stadium is a 60,000-seat venue and has no athletics track, yet the construction costs were in the region of £220 million, which compares favourably with the £496 million cost of the main Olympic stadium.

The key may be the bidding process. The Emirates had a fist of large companies competing in the bidding process. One of the peculiarities of London 2012 is that so few construction companies are putting their hands up for such big and eminent pieces of work.

A similar situation has arisen with the aquatic centre. Eiffel, the French engineering group, recently withdrew its interest, leaving Balfour Beatty as the only one standing.

The future tenancy of the stadium is another issue that may dog London 2012 for months and maybe years. There are five years to run until 2012 and it is thus no real drama that a tenant is not yet signed up and ready to move in. However, the only news item here is that a new state school with a strong sporting bent is to move in when the Olympics have moved on. Recent rumours that West Ham United FC have been back renegotiating a possible tenancy agreement are untrue. Perhaps more concerning is the fact that the Guinness Premiership rugby union teams that London 2012 has approached are not notably interested either.

The obvious rugby tenants are Saracens and London Wasps, but both have worked hard and yet still struggled to build an audience in their present homes and thus declare themselves loath to move on and start to market themselves to a new audience again.

London 2012 presented to Wasps in the summer, but John O’Connell, the Wasps chairman, said yesterday that the club are “very happy where we are” and “not very likely” to move.

This leaves Leyton Orient FC as London 2012’s most likely option. Much is to be revealed today, although when the curtain is lifted and the new stadium is revealed, do not expect Barry Hearn, the Orient chairman, to be standing alongside it.