ABSTRACT
This chapter tells of the early stages of planning for an Olympic Games and its legacy in London. It emphasizes the long lead-in time – a period of almost two decades – in the evolution of London’s bid for the 2012 Games, and draws attention to the dedication and leadership of visionary figures whose early involvement was somewhat eclipsed by the triumph of the final bid team in 2005. The chapter explains the importance of early bid-related documents, which acted as technologies of persuasion,1 materializing sets of ideas, accruing prestige to key advocates, substantiating social relationships between interest groups, recruiting allies to the cause and thereby increasing the project’s scale and chances of success. Highlighted in the chapter are important historical moments relative to the London, UK and global contexts of the 2012 Olympic Games bidding process, including: the internal competition between cities, in this case with Manchester; the associated development of a discourse of urban sporting regeneration and legacy; international aspiration to demonstrate world city status and the national politics of the late 1980s and 1990s, which left London lacking and having to reinvent a strategic sense of itself as a capital city. In the late 1980s, Richard Sumray arrived late at a meeting of the London Council for Sport and Recreation (LCSR) of which he was Vice-Chair. The topic of conversation was how to get young people in London more involved in sport. As Richard sat down, he said, hurriedly, off the top of his head: ‘Why not bid for the Olympic Games?’2 It had never occurred to him before, but Richard’s remark got him thinking: why not bid for a London Games? At the time Richard was a local councillor in the Labour-led North London area of Camden; he had been Chair of Leisure and was Chair of the Social Services Committee. He was committed to promoting the positive benefits of sporting activity and was one of a cadre of civicminded London politicians with a finger in such a multitude of pies that their dedication to the health and social welfare of London’s population might itself be described as Olympian (Evans Forthcoming).3 Richard explains4 that the topic of conversation at the LCSR meeting was still relatively unusual: it was a new thing, from the mid-1980s, to speak of sporting participation. Up until that point the focus of grassroots sports thinking had been about sporting infrastructure – sports centres and buildings, making sure that facilities were in place. The new challenge was how to encourage people, and especially young people, to access the sporting opportunities that were available to them in London. Richard chaired a strategy group, which then published a sports strategy for London (LCSR 1987).
