Calling the Shots

Abstract

The Olympic Games promise great things; world peace and the transformation of the host city are but two ambitions of the Olympic Movement. The benefits and changes that the 2012 Olympics are supposed to bring to the London Borough of Newham—which will host some 80 per cent of the Olympic events—have been much lauded by the Olympic apparatchiks who typically proselytise about the transformation of communities, countries and individuals via the staging of the Games. The local Organising Committee and others—typically within the real estate sector—are the people who shape these sentiments into particular land deals that will serve to justify the plethora of deals, contracts and developments. Whilst the Olympics are about transformations, ostensibly in the lives of athletes, ordinary people and communities, transformations of an even more lasting sort occur in the Olympic neighbourhood through massive construction and servicing contracts. The Olympics are also about discipline which plays out not only in terms of the preparation of athletes to perform at their utmost, but is imperative to all the arrangements required to host such a huge event. For the good of the Games, people living in the shadow of the 2012 Olympic stadium face having their movements and their neighbourhoods subjected to all manner of prohibitions and limitations.