London's budget is up and so is negativity

LONDON — If Los Angeles could hear the lavish grousing about the London 2012 Summer Olympics even five years out, it might find a new four-letter word for Saturday's narrow Olympic bid loss to Chicago.

Whew.

\o7Thanks for not choosing us! Wait, if you think about it, we won!

\f7London "won" in an upset over Paris in July 2005, and the 21 ensuing months have brought some fine fare from the country that's the best in the world at looking in the mirror and locating tough assessments.

That kind of national introspection entertains always, but the entertainment value mushrooms when, say, the projected Olympic budget for the London Games also mushrooms, from 3.4 billion pounds ($6.8 billion) at the outset to 8.6 billion pounds ($17.2 billion) in November to 9.3 billion pounds ($18.6 billion) by March.

And nobody thinks it will halt there, what with a horde of venues to construct, an issue Chicago faces more than Los Angeles did.

Throw in the plot twist that somebody apparently forgot to include an obvious tax in those early projections -- Sir Roy McNulty of the Olympic Delivery Authority went on BBC Radio 4 and gently suggested more "homework" might have helped -- and pretty soon you have got ripeness even for satire, another of the myriad British knacks.

As London emulates Athens 2004 in the Olympic category of budgets that just won't sit still, in an age when security alone can cost $120 million (projected for now, anyway), a few wise sorts here and there have suggested that maybe London could just put the Games on a barge and float them back across the Channel toward Paris.

"The opening ceremony, which is costly and not truly sports-related, could even be transferred to the Stade de France," wrote Jasper Copping in the Daily Telegraph. "A memorandum from the foreign office to the working party, seen by this newspaper, notes: 'The French are very good at fireworks.' "

He did lament that Eurostar trains from Paris to London must "be adapted to enable athletes to continue exercising and stretching during the journey."

Margareta Pagano at the news outlet the First Post brought up Denver, which returned-to-sender the 1976 Winter Olympics after coming to its fiscal senses.

London, as the affluent central nervous system of Earth, won't do that, so its elected officials figure to spend the next five years cheerleading the Olympics' renovation of a decayed East London neighborhood and the debated promises of a revival that long outlasts 2012.