London’s budget is up and so is negativity

If Los Angeles could hear the lavish grousing about the London 2012 Summer Olympics even five years out, it might find a new four-letter word for Saturday’s narrow Olympic bid loss to Chicago.

Whew.

Thanks for not choosing us! Wait, if you think about it, we won!

London “won” in an upset over Paris in July 2005, and the 21 ensuing months have brought some fine fare from the country that’s the best in the world at looking in the mirror and locating tough assessments.

That kind of national introspection entertains always, but the entertainment value mushrooms when, say, the projected Olympic budget for the London Games also mushrooms, from 3.4 billion pounds ($6.8 billion) at the outset to 8.6 billion pounds ($17.2 billion) in November to 9.3 billion pounds ($18.6 billion) by March.

And nobody thinks it will halt there, what with a horde of venues to construct, an issue Chicago faces more than Los Angeles did.

Throw in the plot twist that somebody apparently forgot to include an obvious tax in those early projections -- Sir Roy McNulty of the Olympic Delivery Authority went on BBC Radio 4 and gently suggested more “homework” might have helped -- and pretty soon you have got ripeness even for satire, another of the myriad British knacks.

As London emulates Athens 2004 in the Olympic category of budgets that just won’t sit still, in an age when security alone can cost $120 million (projected for now, anyway), a few wise sorts here and there have suggested that maybe London could just put the Games on a barge and float them back across the Channel toward Paris.

“The opening ceremony, which is costly and not truly sports-related, could even be transferred to the Stade de France,” wrote Jasper Copping in the Daily Telegraph. “A memorandum from the foreign office to the working party, seen by this newspaper, notes: ‘The French are very good at fireworks.’ ”

He did lament that Eurostar trains from Paris to London must “be adapted to enable athletes to continue exercising and stretching during the journey.”

Margareta Pagano at the news outlet the First Post brought up Denver, which returned-to-sender the 1976 Winter Olympics after coming to its fiscal senses.

London, as the affluent central nervous system of Earth, won’t do that, so its elected officials figure to spend the next five years cheerleading the Olympics’ renovation of a decayed East London neighborhood and the debated promises of a revival that long outlasts 2012.

Other elected officials, meanwhile, might lend new terminology to even the five Olympic rings, as did member of Parliament Nigel Evans in media reports when he reckoned future generations might behold the rings and spot a “noose.” When his office was asked for elaboration, he seemed to think none necessary.

The Arts Council and the sports ministry do comment, as the Olympics plan to use their public and lottery funds to the tune of about $792 million for sports and about $450 million for the arts, according to them.

“The impact is likely to be felt by the whole of England and, disappointingly, by smaller arts organizations,” said Arts Council Chief Executive Peter Hewitt. He also said, “We still believe the 2012 Olympics presents a real opportunity for arts and culture in this country.”

“We want to make the Olympics work,” said a spokeswoman at Sport England.

Amid the squalls, Sebastian Coe, the former seven-medal runner who captained London’s bid and leads its organizing committee, said to Emma Brockes of the Guardian, “Some days you think it’s endearing, other days it’s just irritating. We have fantastic levels of excellence at every level, whether it’s the arts, sciences, the quality of our policing or armed services. And yet we sometimes enter a tunnel of despair about it, which few other countries actually do.”

Perhaps only in England could opening ceremonies still five years off get this pre-review from Dominic Lawson in the Independent: “These grotesque shindigs exude the ghastly, philistine mass vulgarity more properly associated with fascist and communist regimes. We really should leave this sort of thing to the experts: Next year’s Olympic opening ceremony in Beijing will show us why.”

And perhaps only in England could a sort of national leader await the London Olympics with these two frank assessments of opening ceremonies, in the Daily Telegraph: “absolutely bloody nuisances” and “absolutely appallingly awful.”

That speaker would be Prince Philip. He’s married to the Queen.