The London Games of 2012, New Labour and the ‘known unknowns’ of the Olympics

ABSTRACT It is usually forgotten that Olympic legacy is a prospective concept, a forward-thinking exercise. Preparing, implementing and delivering an Olympic bid takes more than a decade, a period during which healthy democracies tend to produce new local, regional and national governments, hence prompting changes in the direction of, and the priorities to be pursued through, the Games. This article looks at the 2012 Olympics – generally considered a ‘successful’ Games – through the lens of the urban regeneration of Stratford, where most of the Olympic structures were located. The Games were an almost exclusive Labour party affair until 2008: the election of a new London mayor and the Global Financial Crisis (GFC), combined with the ousting of the Labour national government in 2010, changed this situation. If Labour conceived and started implementing the Olympic project, it was a Conservative mayor and a Conservative-led coalition government that completed it. This work argues that the GFC was used by the new mayor of London and the new British government to focus on recouping government expenditures and prioritising market forces over the local community, hence (partially) derailing the urban regeneration legacy of the 2012 Olympics. While London 2012 demonstrates that the New Labour experience cannot be eradicated as the prosecution of Thatcherism by other means, it also confirms that Olympic legacies – urban regeneration in the specific case of this work – represent one of the biggest ‘known unknowns’ of sports mega-events.