Short of turning out an all-star track and field team to play Spurs in a winner-takes-all battle for the destiny of the Olympic Stadium, the world of athletics surely cannot do much more when it comes to banging the drum for the London 2012 legacy promise to be honoured.
Despite Spurs’ fine current form, an athletics XI including former footballers such as Darren Campbell, Christian Malcolm, Andy Turner, Dean Macey and Dai Greene could probably give the Premier League outfit a run for its money. Greene, after all, once scored a penalty for a Swansea City youth team against Spanish giants Real Madrid, while those mentioned, plus many more, were childhood soccer stars.
Yet jokes aside (and this is definitely no laughing matter) there should be no need for the stadium decision to go to a penalty shoot-out, or even into extra time for that matter, as now appears likely, when the board of the Olympic Park Legacy Company meet to make a decision.
Spurs or West Ham? It is a no-brainer. The West Ham plan is the only one that fulfils the promise London gave to the world. Anyone who thinks it is okay to break that promise lacks dignity and decency – and risks turning Britain into a laughing stock on the international sporting stage. Even Spurs fans say no to Stratford.
Seb Coe, the London 2012 chairman and former head of the FIFA ethics commission, has surely had to bite his diplomatic tongue in recent weeks. Yet on BBC Radio Five last Sunday he said Britain had a “moral obligation” to deliver on the promises made and that “it would be very difficult for us to be taken seriously in the corridors of world sport” if the athletics legacy was scrapped.
Lamine Diack, president of the IAAF and former technical director of the Senegal football team, warned that Britain’s reputation in world sport will be “dead” if they commit “a big lie” and abandon their promise to retain an athletics track.
Other heavyweights such as Daley Thompson, Charles van Commenee and Ed Warner, all big football fans incidentally, have lambasted Spurs’ Olympic demolition plans. As for AW, we are amazed the issue is even being debated.
What happened to the old-fashioned concept of giving your ‘word’? It will be nothing short of a disgrace if we break it and allow Spurs to win.
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