Jumping Through Hoops
When London threw its name into the hat for the 2012 Olympics, many had doubts. Not former sport minister Tessa Jowell. Interviewing Tony Blair, Ken Livingstone, and others Jowell recruited to her cause, Michael Joseph Gross details the grueling, often farcical campaign that won the city its prize—plus a $14.5 billion tab.
BY GERRY PENNY/EPA/LANDOV; BY JEFF GROSS/GETTY IMAGES (INSET).
On July 5, 2005, the mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, took up his pen to make official his city’s agreement with the International Olympic Committee. The 2012 Olympics had not yet been awarded to London—it would be, the following day—but the I.O.C. insists that candidate cities sign an official Olympic contract before the vote is taken, while all the leverage remains on the committee’s side. The contract is an epic masterpiece of micro-management. Its supporting materials, a set of 33 “Technical Manuals,” take up more than four feet of bookshelf space.
As Livingstone prepared to sign, he paused for a moment. Then he looked up at the I.O.C.’s executive director, Gilbert Felli, who was standing by his side, and said, “My lawyers advised me not to sign this contract. But I don’t suppose I’ve got any choice, have I?”
“No,” Felli answered, “you haven’t, really.”
Livingstone told me later that he had just been joking, but second thoughts would have been understandable. The full stipulations of the Olympic contract, which were made public in December 2010 by an East London activist and researcher named Paul Charman, following two years of Freedom of Information requests, contain tens of thousands of binding commitments. To comply with its terms, London must designate 250 miles of dedicated traffic lanes for the exclusive use of athletes and “the Olympic Family,” including I.O.C. members, honorary members, and “such other persons as may be designated by the IOC.” (These traffic lanes are sometimes called “Zil lanes,” alluding to the Soviet-era express lanes in Moscow reserved for the politburo’s favorite limousines.) Members of the Olympic Family must also have at their disposal at least 500 air-conditioned limousines with chauffeurs wearing uniforms and caps. London must set aside, and pay for, 40,000 hotel rooms, including 1,800 four- and five-star rooms for the I.O.C. and its associates, for the entire period of the Games. London must cede to the I.O.C. the rights to all intellectual property relating to the Games, including the international trademark on the phrase “London 2012.” Although mail service and the issuance of currency are among any nation’s sovereign rights, the contract requires the British government to obtain the I.O.C.’s “prior written approval” for virtually any symbolic commemoration of the Games, including Olympic-themed postage stamps, coins, and banknotes.
In the beginning, almost everyone agreed that it would be a terrible idea for London to host the 2012 Olympic Games. In 2002, with the next
year’s 2012 bid-deadline looming, the United Kingdom’s minister for culture, media, and sport, Tessa Jowell, received a one-page memo from an aide who argued strongly against it. If London lost, the country would be humiliated. (Paris, which had lost its last two bids to host the Games, was favored to win for 2012.) If London succeeded, the costs would outweigh the benefits and divert funding from other priorities.
But Jowell was coming off a happy summer. She had helped coordinate the Commonwealth Games (a kind of mini-Olympics for Britain’s former colonies) and also the Queen’s Golden Jubilee. Both were so successful that, as she recalled when I sat down with her in London, “when I got this advice, I thought, Hmm, I’m not sure that we’re just going to say that we can’t bid to host the Olympics. Look what we’ve just done.”
She arranged a series of one-on-one meetings with the other 22 members of Prime Minister Tony Blair’s Cabinet. They were, she recalled, “profoundly skeptical and hostile,” and indeed unanimous in their opposition. They feared a repeat of the swelling budgets and poor management that turned the building of the Millennium Dome into a public-relations fiasco. Jowell said that Gordon Brown, Blair’s chancellor of the Exchequer, told her, “We’re not going to be able to build schools or hospitals if you do these Olympic Games.” (Brown declined to be interviewed for this story.) When she hired economists to conduct a full-scale feasibility study, they too shot her down. “The quantifiable evidence to support each of the perceived benefits for mega-events is weak,” the study concluded. “They appear to be more about celebration than economic return.”
Of the cities that have hosted the Olympics in the past 30 years, Barcelona is one of the few for which the Games created an unambiguously positive economic legacy. The 1992 Summer Games revitalized the city’s waterfront, which has improved the quality of life for everyone there and Barcelona has been a magnet for tourists ever since. Jowell made a trip to Spain to see what the Games had done for the city, and she returned home believing the Olympics could have a similar effect on run-down East London neighborhoods such as Stratford and Hackney. She made that pitch to Ken Livingstone, who has less than zero interest in sports. (“I once went to a cricket match, in 1972, and fell asleep,” he told me.) Livingstone saw the bid—whether London won or lost—as a way to get money for East London infrastructure that might otherwise take decades to secure.
Most important, Jowell needed to persuade Prime Minister Tony Blair, whom she had known for 15 years, and for whom, she had once declared, she would “jump under a bus.” One of Blair’s biggest questions about the bid for 2012 concerned not economics but public image. He did not want to lose face to French president Jacques Chirac by entering a contest that Paris was bound to win.
So, in January 2003, Jowell made a special trip to the I.O.C.’s immaculate white-marble and glass headquarters on a grassy hill by Lake Geneva, in Lausanne, Switzerland. She went there to ask the committee’s dour and sphinx-like president, the Belgian count Jacques Rogge, an orthopedic surgeon and former Olympic yachtsman, whether London would be entering a fair race. Rogge told her what Blair wanted to hear.
With this news—and with a relatively modest budget estimate for the Games of $3.9 billion, which was to be drawn not from the national treasury but from the National Lottery and London’s council taxpayers—Jowell had enough leverage to persuade the majority of the Cabinet, in February, to give the go-ahead. To be sure, there was worry that the budget estimate was a complete fantasy. Blair himself remained hesitant. According to some accounts, he thought it would be unseemly to announce an Olympic bid just as Britain was preparing to join the United States in an invasion of Iraq. Asked about this in a telephone interview, Blair more or less confirmed that assessment. “You wouldn’t want literally at the moment you were going into battle to be talking about bits of the Olympics,” he said.
In early May, after two months of fighting in Iraq, President George W. Bush gave his “Mission Accomplished” speech, announcing that major combat operations were over. For the Olympic campaign, the speech could not have come at a better time: the deadline for applications to host the 2012 Games was nearing. On May 15, Jowell put on a new suit from Liberty, purchased specially for the occasion, and set out for a private meeting with the prime minister. Jowell, who is short, with a broad, determined face, rehearsed her argument all the way to No. 10 Downing Street, where she was shown to the veranda outside the Cabinet Room. The wisteria was in full bloom. According to Jowell, Blair said, “Look, this is very difficult, and I don’t know if we can win it—there are too many uncertainties.” Plus, he didn’t want to have another fight with Gordon Brown.
Information sourced from Vanity Fair
