THE last thing I did before leaving London this afternoon was head out to Olympic Park in Stratford to inspect the precinct where next year’s Olympic Games will be held.
Every month the Olympic Delivery Authority – the organisation tasked with building the London 2012 infrastructure that will eventually hand everything over to LOCOG to run the event – does media tours every months and I was in the English capital in time to do one of the behind-the-scenes excursions.
With London 2012 just over a year away the Olympic precinct is already 90 per cent finished and the Olympic Delivery Authority’s head of design and regeneration Jerome Frost, who escorted our media tour, explained ``the big venues are complete but the grounds are not done’’.
Jerome explained his organisation had been given £9.3 billion to get everything to do with the 2012 Games up and running – that money would have to pay for all the building work and transport system as well as provide security during the Olympic and Paralympics events – and that it had only spent £8.3 billion.
"Not only are we on target, but we are a billion pounds under budget," he said with obvious pride.
"When we started in 2005 our aim was to try to get it built and ready for testing one year out from the Games and we have almost achieved that.
"Olympic Park is a 450ha property, including the Athletes Village which will have 12,000 homes that will be sold after the Games, and while we have generally used British-based architects that wasn’t the intention.
"London 2012 positioned its bid around the redevelopment of East London, to take the opportunity to link a very depressed area back to the city and start a longer regeneration program, and the legacy after transition will be a new urban place.
"Stratford is the in the 2 per cent of the most deprived wards in England, and while the legacy will be great the Olympics has already done a lot for this community with 25 per cent of the 12,000 people who are working on this site coming from this area.
"And of that 25 per cent, 12 per cent of that was previously unemployed, 199 have completed apprenticeships, and 160 women have found careers in the building trade."
We started our tour by driving past the handball stadium, a low brown box that will become a multi-purpose after the Games capable of hosting concerts and conferences, and then to the squat white building that’s been put up temporarily to host the basketball competition.
It was decided during the planning phase that the Olympic Park didn’t need two permanent stadiums around the same size to host both the handball and basketball competitions, so one arena was created to me moved to another location after the 2012 events.
The basketball venue is owned by the company that built the structure, and they will sell it after the Games and move it to a new location, but before then the best players in the world will pound the boards in a structure that’s a PVC skin covering a steel frame.
As the tour continued we crossed a bridge in the middle of Olympic Park and Jerome explained the area was basically a wasteland before the Olympic redevelopment started, a landfill site that was filled with rubble from the Blitz, so a lot of cleaning had to be done before building could start.
"We removed 10m of rubble from across the whole site, and then we replaced it with clean dirt collected during the Channel Tunnel dig," Jerome explained.
"This part of London took a beating during the Second World War, because it was so close to the docks which were bombed constantly, and we did find a few unexploded bombs here when we were doing the cleanup and excavations.
"The largest one we found was a 1 tonne bomb in the riverbed, but I must say we expected to find more than we did because of the amount of bombing here during the war."
Where Blitz rubble once rested around the river there’s now terraced gardens where spectators will pass the time between events, and so much attention has been given to the gardens that a team of scientists were given the job of growing plants that would flower in July instead of June which is when London’s gardens are typically at their best.
Jerome noted that a lot of energy had been put into creating the public spaces surrounding the venues because so many people were expected to use the space during the Olympic and Paralympics Games next year.
It’s expected that 2 million people will visit Olympic Park during the Olympic Games, the busiest day will be the second Saturday of competition when there will be 500,000 people in the complex, and that most of the guests will walking the 3.5km from one site of the compound to the other at least once.
The velodrome was our next stop, a building that was designed to let so much natural light into the cavernous space that training and even some competitions could be done without turning a single bulb on.
This curved building, which is higher at each end to accommodate the steep banks of the track inside, was clad in Siberian pine and then coated in a thick layer of rhubarb juice to prevent the wood from fading and weathering unevenly.
We then cruised past the Athletes Village, which is the only part of the Olympic precinct that looks like it still needs a bit of work with construction crews climbing over the cluster of high-rise buildings that will accommodated 16,800 competitors and 200 officials during the Games.
The Athletes Village, which will be carved into 2800 homes after next year’s Games with 50 per cent given to public housing and the remaining 50 per cent going up for private sale, was designed by 17 different architects with the hope the neighbourhood would look like it grew organic over a few decades rather than a few months.
There was an inspection of the main stadium, the place where the opening and closing ceremonies as well as the track and field events will be help, and while it’s currently formatted to hold 80,000 seats that will be reconfigured after the Paralympics to hold just 55,000 spectators.
"It has one third the amount of steel that was used to build the Bird’s Nest (in Beijing),"Jerome explained.
"It is much smaller than you would expect, but the advantage of that is every spectator is going to be closer to the action on the field than at any Olympics in the past.
"When you look at the main stadium everything you can see that’s painted while is part of the permanent structure, and everything that’s black is part of the temporary structure and will be reconfigured after the Games."
Our last stop was the Aquatic Centre, the building that has copped the most flak from design critics because it’s thought the temporary components of the building have compromised the architect’s creation.
The architect designed a curved and sloping roof to sit over the swimming pool, but to get enough people into to see the Olympic racing two temporary towers were added to each side of the building which completely changed the shape of the concept.
Jerome said he could live with the compromise because it meant they would get thousands of people into see the swimming and, when the seats were removed after the athletes had gone home, London would be left with a beautiful arena.
"Of all the Olympic venues it was the most complex structure to build," he said.
"The roof had to be built on stands, and when we removed those stands and the roof settled it dropped almost 50cm and flattened out more than we expected, but we couldn’t have done that event five years ago because we worked it all out with modern computer modelling."
In the afternoon it was good bye to London and hello to Weymouth, but the Olympic theme continues because this is the place where the sailing competition will be held in 2012.
And tomorrow I get to test my skills on the Olympic course with a morning of sailing.