Olympics In Numbers
- £2.4 billion: Initial budget estimate made by Labour when the bid was won in 2005.
- £9.3 billion: Final budget figure (revised when £2.4 bn number blown out of the water).
- £12 billion: Estimate of how much the Olympics has actually cost.
- £6.1 billion: Amount spent on equipment for Armed Forces in Afghanistan in each year leading up to Games.
- £185 million: Price of each Team GB medal (£12 billion / 65 medals).
- £45 million: Total funding of sports in which Team GB won no medals.
- £40 million: Figure we parted with to build a state-of-the-art handball stadium.
- 40,000: Number of hotel rooms for the Olympic Family paid for by the taxpayer.
- £200: How much each taxpayer contributed to the Games.
Bargain…
“bargain”
This really is silly season.
Forgive my failure to spot the sarcasm in the post.
This is a good take on the Olympics > http://t.co/3OkexJat
Always look on the bright side of life.
And a Spice Girls reunion!!!!!
BARGAIN!!!!
Guido,
Are you Polly Toynbee in disguise?
They should have got their kit off for that money. On second thoughts…
Isn’t this argument all a little academic now? We aren’t going to do it again in our lifetime. On the other hand the EU will continue to cost us £5billion every single year minimum (and rising) and the liblabcon morons think it is good value.
Labour tell us Tony B£iar won London the bid in 2005.
Given the current economic mess London has showcased as a vibrant, multi-cultural centre and worthy to boast “the greatest city in the world”
Paris, Moscow and Madrid would all have struggled to put on a better games, regardless of cost.
Stop bleating about the cost, the money is spent, the games were a success and Britain was shown in a very good light, rather than the evil villains Hollywood seems keen to perpetuate.
Guido should just be happy Dublin weren’t hosting the games.
The REAL figure is closer to £18bn when you include all the fraudulent accounting of pushing spending into others budgets to hide the true costs of the politician’s willy waving Olympics.
Also, watch the UK’s Q3 GDP take a massive nose-dive. The UK will be crippled with the cost of the politicians wet dream Olympics for years.
Look at the “success” of the Millennium Tent in Greenwich, £1.1bn pissed up a wall, and sold off for £1. A disaster for taxpayers. The Olympics is no different.
Lucky now the athletes are “hot property”, they will rake in money FOR THEMSELVES in adverts etc. while the taxpayers pay for their two week jollies for years to come.
Aye. They’ll rake in heaps in personal endorsements after sticking us with the bill for their training. Okay, not me personally, because I don’t play the lottery. But the stupid people do.
Aye. They’ll rake in heaps in personal end*or*se*ments after sticking us with the bill for their training. Okay, not me personally, because I don’t play the lottery. But the stupid people do.
You will be telling me next all those willy waving politicians did not pay for their Olympic tickets.
Good to see its not just lefties who can be po-faced curmudgeons. The Olympics are actually paid for by sponsors, we paid for the venues, infrastructure, organisation and security.
I am fairly relaxed about one off items of expenditure; its recurring expenditure, for instance on the EU, which we should be getting exercised about.
If you spend £1Bn on any item, in 10 years time you will have still have spent £1Bn on that. If you do what lefties always say, and spend that money on teachers, nurses or whatever, in 10 years you will have spent at least £10Bn. This is not difficult but is not said often enough.
Well said. It’s not like the Olympic Park is about to just vanish or the athletes’ village will suddenly vaporise leaving just the bill in its wake.
As for the costs of, say, the army covering security – well they were going to be paid salaries in any event. The total cost may be X billion quid, but take out the capital value of the infrastructure left over and the immense advertising benefit (i.e. what it would cost to advertise Britain around the world non-stop for two weeks otherwise), plus what is going to be sold off afterwards (the Village), and the bill isn’t anything like what the headline figure suggests. And I haven’t even mentioned Opportunity Benefit.
So much for ‘feel good’. I’m a fiscal conservative and I can see that the Games make sense: as an investment in our future and the cultural and sporting life of the country, as positioning the UK on the world stage in a way that nothing else manages… The goodwill and ‘feel good factor’ left overseas after the Games will far outweigh the value of the money spent.
We should do something of this magnitude every year in different parts of the UK. Imagine the benefits this sort of thing would bring Birmingham or Liverpool or Newcastle or Bristol.
Glasgow is getting the Commonwealth Games in two years. I for one can’t wait.
Even a few extra police officers, say, would save lives. One could have patrolled the place where I was threatened with a knife, to prevent a girl from being stabbed and killed in the same place the following night. All that society had educated in that person, gone to waste.
As for ‘advertising Britain’, what for?
“Killed in the same place the following night” Hmmmm
Ledfties hate competitiveness I.E. The everyone gets prizes mantra, and hey guess what the Olympics are the exact opposite, only winners get medals.
Mmm, that sounds like a comforting, right wing idea to me! The GB team are true Tories, they went out there , to perform and over the last 4 years trained their backsides off, dedicated every waking minute to achieve glory for the nation! WTF if a few get a big payoff? They fucking deserve it and any gongs that come their way, unlike the failed politicians and civil servants who get to the HOL. SO fucking wake up, right wingers and don’t slag off 2012 , FFS even the Austrralian press are saying we did better Olympics than Sydney! Fuck off anti Olympic trolls
Boris does the Mo-bot > http://kebabtime.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/boris-does-mo-bot.html
12bn quid for a huge parking lot for Westfield shopping centre. They will be pleased.
Listen the world cannot have too many state-of-the-art handball stadium’s.
W.W.
Endless free kicks.
@ W.W, Fail (twice).
No apostrophe is required in an ordinary plural.
The plural of “stadium” is “stadia”.
Whats the singular for pedantic tosser?
Though to be fair I was educated in a Labour run Comp so it’s a wonder I can read at all.
W.W.
It would be ‘pedantic tossae’ if you were to use the Essex derivation ‘tossa’ as the root.
There is a terrible shortage of parking space in London, so it is good to know there will be some benefits in addition to the country being relaxed and happy.
Using the 9.3B figure, that means 46.5 million taxpayers for Great Britain. Yes?
At least we can breathe a sigh of relief that we will never have to fund it again in our lifetimes.
Our grandchildren will still be paying for this one
Only if we don’t get off our backsides and start earning our way in the world.
Depends how long you gonna live, there’s a good few who watched the 1948 games still around.
£200 for the Olympics?
That’s actually quite decent.
Plus people might have actually learnt that being proud of being British is *gasp* not a crime.
Proud? Of being British? Here is a BBC commissioning editor upon reading your comment.
Exactly. And seeing the left forced to praise elite excellence and support the nation is worth forking out £200 for.
Is it alright to call myself English now that NuLibor have gone.
Yes. Enjoy.
English? I must admit I have not noticed any change since the coalition came in – everything is still being drummed as British though the Scots are certainly not joining in this dogma rant.
I prefer to call myself English even if I have 20% Scots blood.
Are we utterly alone in the world at having a complex about whether it is ‘okay’ to be proud of our country and heritage? Why the hell do we have this chink in our armour for the left to stick their little insidious barbs of self-hatred through, time and time again?
I wonder if the lefties will be screaming for Brazil to acknowledge the displacement and slaughter of South American native peoples central to the history of their young country? Perhaps it should be an integral part of the Rio games opening ceremony?
Will they fuck.
The Olympic Games, £9.3 billion.
Stuffing the French and making Franky Hollande eat his words, priceless.
+un
Tout ce qui étoffes qui tosser doit être la peine de payer pour.
C’est une bonne affaire.
I do trust Cameron will rub his fucking nose in it.
An allusion to another diminutive Frenchman who thought he’d conquered Russia just because he managed to reach Moscow would be most appropriate at this time I feel.
Rumours here indicate Presidential support is waning fast.
I dread to think what will happen when he comes back off holiday.
It doesn’t matter now that presidential support is waning. The c*unt has his feet under the table now. It’s like that surge in popularity Brown got when he usurped the hated Blair. Until the nation realised that he was the mad fucker who had destroyed the UK economy. It didn’t matter. We still had to sit through a further three years of him wilfully fucking it up even more in the name of democracy.
That was the time to be rioting. To get rid of that crazy c*unt.
He is easily manipulated.
He is a bit like a mini James Bond (book version only) in that one of his main weaknesses is women.
I suppose it goes with the territory, and being both small and less than attractive.
Does this include my fee?
It doesn’t include my fee, and I’ve hidden the millions I got from taxpayers in the Cayman Islands. Please give me another gong for services to my wallet.
Did the Cayman Islanders win any medals?
Who the f**k are the ‘Olympic Family’?
The IOC Mafia!
Like the FIFA Family. Sharp suited old men with bulging bank accounts.
and much younger chicks with bulging tits
Awwww Guido. Are you unhappy because the Olympics was a raving success? Is it because a Somali immigrant is now a British poster boy? Disappointed that the “state” was able to put on such a spectacle? Or maybe it’s becaue a beautiful mixed race athlete became the face of the Games?
The games was a victory for ordinary people who loved it – pathetic bitter right wingers like you have had a rubbish two weeks, and the rest of us can rejoice in that!
Please could I have my 800 quid back? Two adults and two kids in my family. I could have put that towards a nice holiday.
It wouldn’t be so bad but on top of the 200 quid each you then had to pay extra to actually buy a ticket. You’d have thought with us all paying 200 quid each they’d have organised it so we could get free tickets.
Strange isn’t it, that an event that celebrates hard work, dedication, and brutal evaluation of performance in stark relation to others is somehow ‘bad for right wingers’. It’s everything the left is terrified of.
But quick, open the gates in case one of the millions of immigrants turns out to be a fast runner. That’s your angle, isn’t it?
*yawn* another lefty screaming racism.
That fiery phoenix looked spookily like the Nuremberg Reichsadler for my liking
You’re simplistically projecting an ideological fantasy caricature. No, this mixed-race son of immigrants enjoyed the feel good atmosphere.
Hear hear. Especially as I remember the collapse of trust between strangers and terror in the streets only a year ago.
Well now the friendly visitors have left and gone home, and the security too, leaving the Londoners to themselves, I’m sure it will all kick off again in your oversized dung heap.
“Oversized dung heap”.. I laughed.
Nearly time for National Riot week again.
Well, all right then, I’m a big-enough man to admit it when I’ve been mistaken. You characters managed to pull it together and not fuck things up beyond all recognition. I commend you, and so does Mr Ryan the next President.
You can’t accuse Greedo of being anti-immigrant.
He loves anything that shits over the English and fucks Britain for the benefit of foreigners especially the dusky ones.
And so after two weeks of joy and euphoria back to the same old tired moaning hacks.
When you put it like that, £200 is a high but not unreasonable price to pay for some very entertaining sport over two weeks, especially as we have been left with a few small improvements to East London, an aear which had been neglected for decades and was due for some attention.
Don’t forget they’re going to be giving the stadium away to a local football club. Every other club in the country, if they want a new stadium, has to borrow half a billion quid or so and fund their own stadium. But West Ham (is it?) or Tottenham are going to be gifted a brand new, state of the art, stadium with masses of parking spaces. For free.
If I was any other premiership manager/owner I’d be fucking well apoplectic.
It wont be for free, think its a long lease on the OS , running track stays.
No, the running track will probably be ripped up (possibly relaid? Who knows?) It is a specially manufactured “superfast” track, ie: harder than any other international competition track. Anyway it is too hard for ordinary training, (all this info courtesy American 400 m legend Johnson). So let’s watch that space. If the existing track stays, it will hardly be used.
They’ll be an unfortunate accident causing the disappearance of a 9 lane 400m running track, lightly used.
You do not seem to know very much about how professional football clubs systematically appropriate public resources and assets all over the country, do you?
That’s enough about Rangers.
I see they scraped a draw at Peterhead yesterday. Laugh? I should say so.
As a Leyton Orient fan I have to say how much I am looking forward to our move to the Olympic Stadium.
Leyton Orient will be able to ‘house’ all their supporters in the puddle of Usain Bolt’s sweat he left on the changing room floor.
Happens all over.
Our local council built a ‘community’ stadium for £37m (entirely funded by local taxes) and leased it to various parties, including the football club.
Except the running costs exceeded the rental income.
So now it is going to be more or less given to the football club for nothing, but the council tax payers will be landed with the bill.
Do you live in Doncaster ?
How much does each taxpayer stump up for the EU every year?
Could we just have an annual Olympics instead? The facilities are all in place now anyway.
They’re in place and rotting in Montreal, Athens, Sydney, Beijing and every other Olympic city too.
This time next year there’ll be nettles, briars, thistles and dandelions growing all over the place.
sound lovely, tha…
Whenever I pass the Olympic Park I can’t help thinking what a marvellous railway yard it would make.
A new national only airport comes to my mind.
£200 each? Sounds like a good deal to me. We only hold the games once every 50 years or so, so that’s £4 per year. Or two pints of beer a year.
Crikey! Where are you getting beer at £2 a pint?
I used to live in London, but then moved somewhere cheaper. Ooop Noooorth,
Good view of the Perseids ooop there?
Where do you get 2 pints for £4?
I want to drink where you’re drinking!
Beat me to it by 11 minutes but then I do type with my toes.
5½ pints of Tesco strong dry cider a year doesn’t sound too bad.
*yawns*
That’ll be 4½ pints come the end of the year.
Even in Croydon we pay over three quid for a pint of Australias finest beer…nigh on four quid really.
Well, when we sold the gold we had to spend it on something. Might as well be a two week junket where we get left with some white elephants.
Dividing budget by medals won is disingenuous at best.
You obviously have no clue what the Olympics are all about.
It’s about enriching the IOC.
Is it not where the taxpayer pay £12b to give a number of mulit nationals a great marketing oppertunity?
W.W.
The most we can hope for is that because the weather (largely) held that foreign broadcasters will have been show-casing London tourist attractions overseas and Hank and Beth from Buttfuck, Arizona will decide to spend a vacation in London instead of Paris.
There may be a slight tourist bounce next year.
Otherwise a complete waste of money. Too bad Paris didn’t win.
Beth from Buttfuck’s more than welcome… Hank can do one, mind.
Beth and I were originally going to go to Hawaii for our 25th Anniversary, but you’re right; London is far and away the better choice on so many levels. Thank NBC for showing us all that colorful Britishy horseshit like tea and crumpets, the Changing of the Guard, the Beefeaters and all of that. It’s all so wonderfully quaint– nothing like that in America! Sure, we’ll be glad to throw you a few bucks, as long as the exchange rate favors us, of course.
Actually i thought it was pretty good.
Might as well as spent £12b on that than giving it to bankers or public sector wasters, or some third world spongers
Anyway it’s OK, old Merv can just print some more.
W.W.
I think he should have least applied some kind of weighting factor to the different types of medals; you cannot say a bronze is worth as much as a gold.
and as the host nation, didn’t we pay for *all* the medals anyway…?
It is a shed load of money to spend, but the feel good factor of the British people the last three weeks. Priceless. Plus the Olympics have changed the perception of Britain on the world stage. Two weeks ago the world thought we were shit at sport but great at music. Now they know otherwise.
We could have been ‘great at sport’ for a lot less than 12bn quid. In fact the ‘great at sport’ bit was funded by 240 million quid over the last four years.
Ahhh, the true spirit of amateur sport. 8 Million quid per gold medal.
TWO FUCKING weeks not THREE. You’ve been listening to the lies from the BBC again. And what feelgood factor?
Wonderful how the bbc stated that “the media” went from doom and gloom over the Olympics to delirious joy. They were actually describing their own actions, the hypocritical gits.
But iIf the weather’s any good next summer, we’ll be having the riots again.
Don’t be so sure. There’s a couple of thousand people in prison for six months plus who thought that it was all a bit of harmless fun last summer. I think the message is filtering down to the agent provocateurs of The Grauniad, BBC and Labour that they might find it a lot harder to incite riots next time around.
You overestimate the intellect of the inner cities Great Unwashed.
we could just bundle them all into the olympic stadium and let them fight it out to the death…
hopefully the tv cameras will still be running.
Now they know the opposite.
Certainly shit at music, if the closing ceremony is anything to go on!
On reflection, the closing ceremony was dire. Since when is Jessie fucking J the centre of our musical culture? Where were the umpteen better acts? The one high point for me was that Robbie fucking Williams was absent.
I hope the PA was better in the stadium than it sounded on TV.
Yes, £200 per tax payer is a shitload and will take generations to clear.
Better than wasting it on building fourteen hospitals and a stem cell reseach facility.
True. At least it’s a one-off 20bn quid. With these PFI hospitals and such you end up with hundreds of thousands of public sector workers and their pensions that have to be paid for eternity.
It was totally worth it just to see Jessica Ennis win the 800 metres to get her gold medal.
Is that the very same Jessica Ennis who they reckon will make between £2m and £3m next year on sponsorship opportunities?
Yes, and she will pay tax on that income, win win.
You reckon?
Unless she does a runner. But you are correct most will pay tax here and a lot of those future earnings will be generated abroad.
Plus these celebrities do deserve their moments of fame – unlike many of the non-entities (Big Brother,etc) that are regularly paraded on our TV screens. They don’t give gold medals away. They have to be earned and people have to work hard and make many sacrifices to get them. Good luck to Wiggins, Farah, Ennis, Kenny and all of them. The media constantly bombards us with the dregs of society, such as Hazell. It is a refeshing change to have the cream of society on our screens.
Imagine that. Someone dedicating years of their life to becoming the best at their chosen field & then reaping the reward of all that hard work and success…
…perhaps she should have spent the last few years on her arse in front of the telly? That’s a much better role model for the nation’s kids.
+ 110%
There fixed that for you ….
Imagine that. Someone dedicating years of their life to becoming the best at their chosen field & then reaping the reward of all that hard work and success…
Did it without someone else paying for it.
It’s the same Jessica Ennis who is a doll of the first order and whose washboard stomach enthrals me.
That’ll free up Boris to take over from Ned Miliband.
Yet another reason why I’m glad I no longer live in London.
Seb Coe is despised by many people in London.
Not just London.
And not just people
Baa!
Two questions.
1) Where is the hole you lot have all been hiding in for the past two weeks?
and
2) Would you mind going back there?
She’s gone back to Holland with the rest of the team.
Van Dyke?
Fuckin hell !
Yes. We shall all go there together.
Psst !
Wanna make some dosh quickly.
Try shorting the Australian Dollar,I have.
Lets just turn this around. Imagine the celebrations if Cameron announced that rather than doing the Olympics every single person in the UK was getting £200 tax free (net cost same). Now imagine how that would …
1. Perk up the nation
2. Maybe reduce some of the personal debt mountain (or)
3. Up the growth figures
Even people not in London and not into sport would be happy.
Yeah I’m sure if the government gave away £200 to everyone they’d use that to reduce their personal debt…get real.
No you get real and read my post (why I said or).
So if they didn’t reduce their debts it would be spent so therefore growth would go up. Can’t have it both ways.
Even assuming everybody went out and spent their £200 on a VAT-able item the amount of ‘growth’ it would encourage would be utterly negligible! Growth is something that occurs over a period of time, and is not going to be effected significantly by Joe Bloggs going out and buying himself a new TV as a one off.
Right so £12bn dropped in a week on whatever does not effect growth that much. But overspending £12bn (from original budget) with a dubious ROI is a good idea.
Why don’t you go and start your own finance and sports related blog?
You utter fucking moron. The very fact that you only see ‘growth’ in terms of how much VAT will be generated marks you down as a mattress-soaker of the first water.
Can you have a word with the gummint then please, and point out that they can’t blame a couple of days rain or an extra bank holiday as a reason that growth was crap that Qtr?
Jeez
Some would. Some would blow it all on booze and fags. But it would certainly stimulate the economy more than an empty stadium in a part of London that nobody will ever visit again.
A very good point.
The chavs (thats 95% of the UK pop) would piss it up the wall in Benidorm, no benefit to Britain at all.
So they get there for nothing then? What do they fucking walk? Or maybe they spend the £200 on a flight first !!!
99% up here!
…and where would the government get this £200 to give everyone?
By not spunking it on an Olympic vanity project
From the Indian overseas aid budget, or by not funding this lot :
http://www.isro.org/
Take into account the related costs (Government departments) actually puts the figure closer to £50bn but hey, worth it just to watch Boris skank dance and Jessie J’s camel, right?
There are 26 million tax payers, and 12 billion costs, that is a cost of £461 per tax payer. However, the real cost is much higher as they have undoubtedly fiddled the books.
Unfortunately, you are not allowed to know the actual figures, but yes, you are correct.
as well as the money that was actually directed towards 2012 there are also all of the projects that were cut, because of funding for 2012, to be taken in to account
Cost to GB of people whinging, moaning and generally running it down = unestimable, but expensive.
Guido – get yourself a life, and then ENJOY IT!
Otherwise: please emigrate to Syria, or join the Taliban.
I am at work during a 30 minute break during my 8 til 5 shift in order to pay tax to fund this shite
It was a waste of money – period
+1
James, are you able to point to Syria on a map of the world?
No you’re not ;- )
Anyway, you’ve just got the hump because you can’t get the BBC there. No wonder your attitude toward The Games has been entirely negative.
Good job Guido has his feet on the ground and prepared to face and tell the truth unlike some Faeries living in Cuckoo land, a good percentage of the team GB were not even British, I understand Mo the Great has even represent two other countries for his sport.
No Guido is correct, this is serious money and for those living in Faerie Land, we are as a Country seriously in debt with far more serious problems ahead.
2.4 billion bid to win the games and a final bill aproaching 12 billion and we are still being told the games came in on time and on budget ??????????
With bean counters like that no wonder that this country is in a mess.
To be fair, the budget was finalised in 2007. Head slap and his no idea what he does deputy had no say, only options were to increase the spend.
The security budget was not accounted for in the year 2007 and we as tax payers still have to pick up the bill.
Did it really cost that much, after ticket sales, sponsorship and any after-games sell-offs?
If not then the true cost before those must have been staggering.
quite.
.
why are we hopeless/dishonest/incompetent about estimating and money management.
It is a bargain, it’s less than one percent of just ONE YEAR of UK GDP. I was expecting it to be much, much more expensive.
So where would you rather the money went, it’s not like we liquified the cash and pissed it up the wall, it got spent in British industries and pushed the british economy. “Whats all the whingeing about? That we could have saved the money and paid it out on benefits, no thanks. Glorious 2 weeks for a well deserving British public. At the end of the day it was never gonna be the olympics that bankrupted the country and I guarantee that a lot of people out there will tell you that it was a highlight of the year, maybe even the decade!
I’m inclined to think it was worth it both as an injection of some badly needed national self confidence and as a boost for future tourism.
Watching the marathon yesterday I couldn’t help thinking that the organisers had prepared a great course to showcase the sights and they had the bonus of sunshine which must have made people want to visit -St Pauls looked simply stunning.
Of course we all know how Central London really looks on a wet day in January….
I like a bit of a knees-up, me.
.
.
brill…… it was kinda karmic clearance after Blair’s wars.
Bargain for anyone outside London who will never see a penny in return ? I don’t think so.
Be honest, our armed forces need the money , our health service needs the money , our transport and infrastructure (outside London) needs the money, and even our welfare system needs the money.
Splurging such monumental wads of cash on a 2 week jolly for London is just obscene.
Fuck the NHS, fuck transport and infrastructure, fuck the welfare system. I need the bloody money.
It’s not a question of what we spend this 20bn quid on. We don’t have 20bn quid to spend in the first fucking place. It’s a false dichotomy. Spend it on this or that. Bollocks. Don’t spend it at all. Don’t spend what you ain’t got. Spending what we ain’t got is what has got the UK into this clusterfuck.
Liverpool needs the money.
A very expensive take on pushing the multicultural dream, The Games are far too political now and we poor bloody taxpayers do not get a say in where our money goes, just like the EU dream, a failure. The Olympic Family should pay for thier own bloody Games. Just to think ,we have people being refused important drugs by the NHS, Elderly folk having thier homes sold off to pay for care, what a state this Country is in, the only exception is if you are an asylem seeker or immigrant when the law is weighted in thier favour and get everything they ask for, all paid for by the tax payers. It is time for this Nation to wise up to the political Failure Parties in this Country. At this moment in time we live under the ” Cameron Regime” nearest thing to a Dictatorship we have had for some time, is it not time for it to go, is there not some other Country out there coming to our aid to give us democracy ?
Now you mention it, Cameron does have the attitude of Oliver Cromwell. He’ll be invading Ireland next.
Total waste of money and what’s worse bonkers Dave has committed even more money to the Rio Games. FFS when the Olympics was only open to amateurs then a little help was OK but now that these athletes become multi millionaires trained up at the public expense, it sucks.
Extra money pledged to Rio is intended to be made up from ‘Legacy’ events and Lottery (UK Sport). Undoubtedly, the estimates will be wrong, so Government will have to make up the short fall, yes.
I’d rather pay for the Indian Space Programme.
I’d rather pay for the Jamaican space programme
.
.
Indians are after status….americans like research……and the Jamaicans?
The Jamaicans are after Class “A” drugs, innit?
Tessa Jowell started this spending spree orrff.
By her own admission she was the one who wanted to bid for the games and started the ball rolling.
The rest of NuLab jumped onto the bandwagon seeing a nice bit of bread and circuses, loads of publicity and a lovely vanity project that would give them a legacy.
We should surcharge the entire Labour party and movement to recover that £12bn.
Socialism – Spending your money as it grows on trees.
Firkin Scum.
15 billion waasted on NHS computers system
10 billion wasted on Prescott’s fire control rooms
Probably 100 billion on Labour’s wars
And all affordable if the rich paid their taxes. And Vodaphone, and Google, etc.
.
.
..
Having succeeded in watching absolutely none of the Olympics I would like to know how to claim my £200 back.
I never go and watch the changing of the guard or the Lord Mayor’s parade. I don’t ask for my money back.
But then you weren’t relieved of £200 for the privilege without being asked, were you ?
Delighted the Anabolic Steroid Games is over. Managed to avoid every bloody boring minute, nay second, of it.
When will we be told how large the bribes were to secure this crap event?
£25m – excluding miscellaneous items for Tessa Jowell whilst in Spain, Tampax, etc.
IOC is totally clean. Ask Seb Coe who was on the FIFA ethics committee which also failed to fine one iota of corruption in FIFA.
.
.
if £3bn estimated cost becomes £9bn plus actual cost…then does the buck stops with seb coe?
The takings in my takeaway are down 269% in the last two weeks.
How am I going to have any money to pay taxes to clear the National Debt?
You dont have to Abdul, they will simply print more money, to them it is easier than earning it !
Let’s say it costs a one-off £12billion over 5 years or so. But most people did at least get plenty of enjoyment out of it. Now let’s look at the EU. That costs us at least £5billion every single year net (not counting all the bailout money for Ireland and lots more via the IMF). Who has got any enjoyment out of that – other than the serial troughers?
The only thing that can be said is Cameron has to go and sooner the better.
Does anyone else agree ?
I disagree.
Keep Dave until 2015 is the Labour Party motto.
Which way to the DUDCA website ? (I seem to have lost my compass.)
+ £12bn
I am delighted to announce that my company will donate £2.5 million to the armed forces.
More importantly,I have instructed all of our directors and staff to refrain form voting Tory ever again.
G4S was supposed to receive £284 million for supplying 10,400 security people. (I know they didn’t but that was the agreed contract). That works out as £27,307 per person for 2 weeks work – or if it includes the paralympics 4 weeks work. I don’t suppose that the people on the ground received anything like that sum. So somebody was going to make megabucks on that contract. If G4S had a contract like that I think we can only assume that other companies did too.
I could have failed to supply 10,400 people for half that figure.
Unfortunately this is how all government contracts work. Which is why you start with two aircraft carriers costing a billion quid each and end up with 1.5 aircraft carriers costing 3bn quid each and no planes to fly from them.
The money was stolen
I’ve never seen so many hometown decisions and domestic robberies in my life.
Nation of fair play, don’t make me fucking laugh.
But did you enjoy it Guido? Surely the GB pride made it worth every cent?
5 mins of THE WHO was worth £12 billion not bothered about the athetes
+1 They sound better now than they did 50 years ago. Was that Zak Starkey on drums?
I don’t mean to spoil the party but I must note one correction to the figures:
12 Billion may be the cost of the Olympics. This cost would have to have been borne by someone. I don’t think you can say 12B / 65 is the cost of every GB Medal. That is pure lunacy from the the RT Hon Gordon Brooon school of Maths.
More like Total cost of sports funding / 65 which may be an equally mind boggling figure but it is more likely to be correct.
I totally agree (see my lower comment made before I read yours). Lazy, stupid journalism from a blog that prides itself as “reality based”.
the price of everything – the value of nothing
The Tory party’s motto
Somebody else may have made this point, but what is the point of dividing the cost of *putting on the Olympics* with the number of GB medals to get a cost-per-medal? Surely you should be dividing *the amount of funding given to training the GB competitors* to get the cost per medal? Or is that too reality based?
£12 billion is what the Olympics cost. The cost of training our competitors, much of which is funded by the idiot tax known as the National Lottery, is completely different.
Surely its time for a ‘European’ Olympics in Brussels.
We can all pay again to host it.
I have yet to see the money paid by commercial sponsors factored into the cost – they must have paid a few billion. But once again, that doesn’t make for such an exciting factoid does it.
Anyone know whether Lord of The Olympic Rings Baron Coe gave his time and effort free of charge like the 60,000 volunteers, or did he in fact get a fat fee?
I should qualify perhaps by saying I am not being a bit of a wet blanket, I just worry as soon as a “Lord” gets involved.
Can you just imagine the cost to us if Mandleson’s financial needs had been an issue by way of his involvement in any of the proceedings.
It was me who made these games possible. You should all be grateful that I managed to welcome and put my arms arms around so many celebrities and kissed their arses at the same time. I have now decreed that competitive sport will be the major education in our schools. It does not matter that children are leaving unable to read, write or manage simple mathematics – if they can run fast that’s all they need. Just look at how our country is now considered by the rest of the world – we are admired and worshipped – at least that’s what Boris has told me.
anybody any idea how viewing figures are calculated ?
The story goes that there are 5000+ TV households in the UK monitored by the BBC for their national viewing figures.
I leave it to you to understand how the families with their multiple TV’s and friends were chosen by the BBC.
All very 20th century.
A final minor cultural event signifying the terminal decline of a nation.
An embarrassment.
£185m for each medal??? Duhh! You’re forgetting that included in that price is also THE FACKING GAMES THEMSELVES! If I bought a car for £10,000 I wouldn’t then complain that I’d just spent £10,000 on a radio!
I distinctly remember Livingstone in 2007 emphasizing that the Games would be cost neutral apart from a slight surcharge for London Council taxpayers of about 20 quid.
Perhaps we should have a Public Inquiry.
•£185 million: Price of each Team GB medal (£12 billion / 65 medals).
See comments above re funding v medals. The acual cost is around £10m per gold.
•£45 million: Total funding of sports in which Team GB won no medals.
Not our of your pocket – from lottery funding.
Lazy.
Aside from the event itself:
A huge East London cess pit has been cleared for new housing
The elimination of competitive sports from our schools will be seen for what it is
BoJo will be the next PM
£200 a head IS a bargain.
More like £310 each
Guido how much of the figure was lottery funding? And does the figure include sponsors/partners/supporters? #justwondering
I didn’t watch any of the games and couldn’t care less about them. Can I have my £200 back please? I can think of a lot of better things I could spend it on!
This is a stupid blog post.
The overspending is the only real complaint, and is fair enough, but also it’s a hell of a lot less than the Chinese spent on Beijing. And actually not too expensive as far as olympics go anyway.
“£6.1 billion: Amount spent on equipment for Armed Forces in Afghanistan in each year leading up to Games.”
You cannot compare these two things in any way.
“185 million: Price of each Team GB medal (£12 billion / 65 medals).”
This is so stupid I cannot believe! The games are about so much more than just winning the medals! Surely nothing even needs explaining in terms of how stupid a calculation this is!
“£45 million: Total funding of sports in which Team GB won no medals.
£40 million: Figure we parted with to build a state-of-the-art handball stadium.”
This coupled with the last comment implies that all the writer cares about is winning medals and golds, which again, is not the sole purpose of the games! This shows no sportsmanship or gentlemanly demeanour but a greedy dumb view of what these events mean. The fact that these athletes get to compete at this level, in front of these crowds and have the experience of their lives is worth more than any medal…
“40,000: Number of hotel rooms for the Olympic Family paid for by the taxpayer.”
No idea what this proves…..
“£200: How much each taxpayer contributed to the Games.”
a) this is wrong, as more tax is taken from some people than others and varies greatly and b) so what? That’s not from one year. And well how much do all the other things cost us then? There’s no reference point here! It’s just a figure. With no frame of reference or time period how on earth is this figure supposed to mean anything? You didn’t even write £200 in tax, just £200! So is it even from tax? Maybe this is from merchandise, tickets etc! I’m sure it is from tax, but again, no frame of reference and no effort put into this.
A lazy article with nothing of any use to anyone, and so inaccurate and misleading it’s unbelievable.
Over half the population said their spirits were lifted by the games. That’s over 30 million people just in this country. Of all the millions, well billions of people round the world who had an amazing time cheering on their teams and enjoying amateur sporting brilliance, I think £9 bn isn’t too bad a price tag to be honest.
how do you work the logic of costing Team GB medals by dividing the entire cost of hosting the games? Don’t get the logic.