By Shikha Dalmia
On the eve of the 30th Summer Olympics, the most
striking thing about this city was the complete lack of street buzz. In
contrast to the 2008 Beijing Olympics, when all of China was mobilized for the
games, there was no discernible excitement in the air.
Commercial establishments are
not planting new flowers or scrubbing old buildings to impress foreign guests.
There are no giant screens in public squares hyping the extravaganza. Streets
aren’t lined with posters of British athletes. Among the few signs that
something is afoot—besides roving armed troops—are tacky plastic runners
wrapped around park fences depicting stick figures in various sporting poses (a
decoration more worthy of a high school prom than an international event). Many
Londoners I’ve spoken to—taxi drivers, dry cleaners, residents—consider the whole
thing a “bloody nuisance” that they are planning to observe from some other
European city far from the traffic snarls and the madding crowds.
No doubt the many snafus in
the run-up to the games have dampened public enthusiasm. But the bigger reason
Londoners are so unmoved is that the era of nationalistic fervor whipped up
through mega-projects is over in the West. The West, quite simply, may have
outgrown these games.
The London Olympics, like
every Olympics before them, are hopelessly over-budget. The city has already
blown its original $4 billion budget target four times over on obligatory new
stadiums and athlete villages. Meanwhile, G4S, the firm that was awarded the
security contract for the games, failed to deliver enough personnel, forcing
the military to be called in. British authorities have also perched
surface-to-air missiles on rooftops of private apartment buildings, scaring the
living bejeezus out of residents. As if that weren’t enough, a scheme to award
tickets via lottery went horribly wrong when overburdened websites crashed,
leaving people who had paid thousands of dollars up front hanging for weeks
before finding out if they were among the lucky winners.
