Trial by Jeory

For what it’s worth, here’s my take on the countdown to the Olympics, It was published in the Sunday Express about two weeks ago. And I did NOT write the headline, by the way….

IN 1983, budding athlete Michael Spinks was what he now describes as “training fodder” for an Olympic champion by the name of Sebastian Coe.

He was one of a group of runners who helped prepare the international star for even greater heights in Los Angeles in 1984. Three decades later Coe is the chairman of the London Organising Committee of the Olympic Games and, with the opening ceremony a mere leap year and 10 days’ time away, Spinks is going to sue him.

Spinks is now managing director of Essex Flour and Grain, a catering supplier on the edge of the Olympic Park that risks going bust amid a huge security lock-down during next year’s Games. “I’ve sent a message to Coe,” he says. “It’s you and Locog [the London 2012 Organising Committee], Seb, versus me and EFG. May the best man win but you haven’t got a prayer.”

Spinks may be angry, but he’s not bitter. He is a businessman of the more generous mould and, instead of shunning the Olympics, is helping to make a once miserable area a better place.

Literally a stone’s throw from the Olympic Park across the River Lea, he’s allowing a group of artists led by Marek Wasniewski to use his depot to inject life and fun into the under-used waterways and even into nearby concrete slabs. Wasniewski pays tribute to Spinks: without him, he says, his boat building project (he takes people on short canoe tours of the river) would not be there.

Neither would the arty Folly café and open-air cinema, run by young architects on the towpath under a road flyover, which will delight hundreds of families every weekend throughout the summer. Spinks provides their electricity and water and has set aside a strip of his depot as the artists’ creative hub.

It is Spinks’ struggle against the corporate Olympic machine and Wasniewski’s dream to create a sustainable area which locals can be proud of after next year’s jamboree, that sum up my own love-hate marathon with London 2012.

For me it will be the climax of several years of fluctuating emotions. I’ve lived in the same place in Bow since 2002 and was all too familiar with the area where a new mini-city now stands. It was previously an industrial wasteland of filthy marshes whose main attractions were thousands of scrapped cars.I live just 800 metres from the Olympic Stadium (1min 41 seconds in Coe-time) but, thanks to the disgraceful ticketing process, like thousands of other neighbours on July 27 next year I will have the dubious pleasure of listening to the opening ceremony through my sitting room windows while watching it unfold on my TV screen inside.

For most of those nine years I’ve also been a journalist and have watched the Olympic journey more closely than most. While Seb Coe’s organising team spewed out its propaganda, I’ve covered those who have lost out and those who were simply concerned.

I’ve reported on the bulldozing of businesses, the burial of radioactive waste, how official records show an unexploded Nazi bomb under the main stadium, the invitation from a nearby housing estate to Barack Obama for tea and scones when he attends the Games and how the site once housed a PoW camp for German soldiers.

Our reporting also improved the conditions for the hundreds of ex-Gurkha soldiers who guard the perimeter of the park. Yet despite all those articles, and despite the £9.3billion cost, I have a growing pride for the area; an excitement and admiration for what has been achieved.

I was among a coach load of political journalists from Westminster touring the park a couple of months ago. All were equally impressed. Locals are also warming to the project: the chat down East End pubs is where they’ll put the Olympic flame (my own hunch is on top of Anish Kapoor’s Orbit installation; you read it here first).

Last Sunday I cycled the canal and river towpaths on the edge of the park with Alberta Matin, an amateur triathlete who grew up in the East End and who now works in architectural design. A few years ago those pathways were muddy, neglected and uninviting. Now they have come alive with families on days out and with other cyclists and walkers admiring the wildlife on one side of the water and the Olympic venues on the other.

Marek Wasniewski and his friends from the Folly café were also there, bringing a buzz to an area that simply didn’t exist before. Alberta told me: “We’ve had two major regeneration projects in this part of London, but whereas Canary Wharf was for businesses, this is for real people. It’s a massive chance for us.”

She’s right. In September a huge Westfield shopping centre will open in Stratford, right next to the Olympic Park. If anything it could be a bigger catalyst for change than the Games itself.

There are worries about the ugly houses in the Athletes’ Village but overall, despite my sympathy for Michael Spinks’s lawsuit, I think Seb Coe could have been right: this was a once in a lifetime opportunity to regenerate, to bring the centre of London east.

So, as we enter the home straight, let the Games end and let the Legacy begin.

PS Can I have a few tickets now please, Seb?