London Olympics 2012 on Track, Claims Andy Hunt
Andy Hunt, the Chief Executive for British Olympics Association has claimed that the preparations for London Olympics 2012 were on schedule and he expected to deliver a fantastic games event to the spectators around the globe. Talking to the media personnel
on Tuesday, the chief executive said that the government’s decision to exclude Olympics games spending from major cuts to reduce the country’s deficit was commendable.
Reportedly, there has been a budget allocation of 9.3 billion pounds for London Olympics 2012 event. Out of this huge amount, 7.3 billion pounds would be spent on regeneration of east London.
While addressing the press after a meeting of National Olympics Organizations in Acapulco Hunt expressed that cutting off the Olympics’ budget would have been a crazy step. He was of the view that allocation of two billion pounds for staging the sport event
was rather appropriate; with such huge sums of money, the games could turn out to be fantastic.
Today Mr. Seb Coe, the chairman for London Organizing committee is expected to present a progress report before the Association of National Olympics Committee. The report would encapsulate all the details of the works which have been duly completed and the
proposed schedule for the pending tasks.
Pondering upon the success for convincing the government to not to cut the budget for the London Olympics, Andy Hunt said that they had to lodge a lot of lobbying efforts for pursuing the authorities. However, he also admitted that for the government too,
things were quite difficult to handle on economic fronts. “In the toughest economic crunch of the times if the authorities have the nerve to retain spending upon the sports that must be welcomed with open hearts,”
said the chief executive.
Talking about the preparations work, Hunt said that regeneration of a large part of eastern side of the London city would help them carve an outstanding legacy and would transform the eastern side of the city to admirable standards.
Hunt hoped that the Olympic stadium would be able to retain the running tracks after the games would be over, however he also admitted that the final decision had to be taken by the Olympic Park Legacy Company.
While bidding for the Olympics games, the officials at London had promised to keep athletics as a part of long run future of the stadium, it is expected that after the 2012 games would be over, most probably they would keep their promise.
A major improvement in this regards was witnessed when two of the Premier League Football teams expressed their interest in moving to the Olympic stadium, however a considerable hindrance on the way forward was the proposal from London Club West Ham United
to keep the running track. A few months back West Ham had submitted a joint offer with local government of Newham east London in which they had requested to retain the track of the stadium for 537 million pounds. The request was also backed by the governing
body of the UK athletics.
Another bid had been submitted by a rival London club known as Tottenham as a joint venture in collaboration with American entertainment and sport giant AEG. However, they do not have any plans to keep the athletics track intact.
Commenting upon the situation, Hunt said that he felt encouraged after several good bids for stadium had been submitted. He also added that provision of a world class athletics track in the stadium was at the top of their agenda and failing to do so would
be equally disappointing for them.
On the other side, David Campbell the chief executive for AEG Europe told the media correspondents that he believed there were two other credible bids; however, the total number of bids could rise to 30 for the remarkably large stadium situated on a huge
560 acres of site in the most rundown part of the capital of England.
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