LONDON: London, an ancient city steeped in theater and pageantry, stages its third summer Olympics against a somber backdrop tempering the excitement and anticipation before the world?s greatest sports festival.
Euphoria in Singapore, where London secured the Games in 2005, was succeeded within 24 hours by horror in the British capital when 52 commuters were killed by four suicide bombers.
Consequently the Games of the Olympiad, opening at the Olympic stadium in east London on Friday, will feature Britain?s largest peacetime security operation which has further inflated the budget in troubled economic times.
?The security threat comes from a number of diverse actors ranging from Al-Qaeda affiliated terrorists, lone wolves acting independently, Irish Republican Army offshoots as well as anarchists,? said an assessment from the Asia-Pacific Foundation, a London-based think tank.
?Another potential danger is street violence similar to the wild, apparently spontaneous and totally unpredictable riots, that hit parts of London for five days in August 2011, causing hundreds of millions of pounds in property damage.?
London?s creaking transport system, criticized as ?often obsolete? by International Olympic Committee (IOC) inspectors after the city was short-listed for the Games, is another problem.
So, too, is the unpredictable British climate during a summer of unrelieved gloom and drenching rain, although signs that the weather gods may have finally relented came at the weekend with clear skies, rising temperatures and optimistic forecasts.
On the plus side, the Asia-Pacific Foundation report pointed out that Britain has a ?very successful track record? in hosting major sports events, a point stressed by London 2012 Olympics organizing committee chairman Seb Coe.
?You do not want people coming to London feeling they have come to a siege town,? Coe told Reuters. ?London stages these global events all the time and often at the same time. We have a good track record but I am not being remotely cavalier or particularly sanguine about the nature of what we have to do.?
London held the 1908 Olympics at the height of the golden Edwardian summer when Britain ruled much of the world. The 1948 Games were hosted by a city ravaged by wartime bombing in an emotionally and physically exhausted country burdened by a record debt.
In a link with the past, the Olympic Park is located in an area of London which suffered some of the worst bombing in World War II, as part of a program of economic regeneration.
Britain possesses an unparalleled sporting history, stemming from that astounding period in Victorian Britain when the rules for virtually all the games now played throughout the world were either invented or codified.
?We?re coming to a nation that invented modern sport in the second half of the 19th century,? IOC president Jacques Rogge said at Formula One?s British Grand Prix this month.
?We?re also coming to a nation that has included sport in its school curriculum and it?s a nation that loves sport, knows sport, and that will show.?
The Olympic movement has been criticized as bloated, grandiose and in thrall to the sponsors and television companies who provide the money which underpins modern sport.
No credible alternative economic model exists and, even if the IOC ceased to exist, the sports and leisure industries would soon entice the individual federations into new multi-sports commercial ventures.
Under Rogge, the IOC has moved with the times and there is also nothing remotely bloated about the background of the athletes expected to make the most impact when the track and field competition, the core sport of the Games, starts on Aug. 3.
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