Forget faster, higher, further. The toughest and most important of all Olympic contests is the competition to host the summer Games. The opportunity to win never comes to a city more than once in a generation, and the winner reaps an enormous benefit, as Barcelona, Sydney and Athens can all testify.
This summer, the International Olympic Committee will announce which city is to host the 2012 Games — and London is among the favourites in a heavyweight contest, along with Paris, New York, Madrid and Moscow.
If London does win, the transformation of the Lea Valley in London’s East End into Olympic Park, a fitting showcase for the world’s greatest athletes, will represent the greatest single challenge to British engineers of the early 21st century. But victory would also be a victory for British engineers, since much of the appeal of London’s bid is down to the engineering vision.
One man who has been through the experience already is Dennis Lenard, chief executive of Constructing Excellence, an organisation set up by the Department of Trade and Industry to promote best practice in the building industry. An engineer from Australia, he worked in Sydney in the lead-up to the Games there in 2000.
“It was thinking out-of-the-box that won it for Sydney, and I see something similar in this country,” he says. “The level of creativity in the engineering sector here means London is going to have the best chance.”
Lenard is not referring just to the proposed layout of Olympic Park or the stadium specifications for the London bid, although they are innovative beyond anything yet imagined. He is also thinking of the ground-breaking construction methods being pioneered in Britain — such as reducing the amount of work done on site to less than 50% of the total by manufacturing large sections at a consolidation centre, using advanced processes, thereby making enormous savings in time, cost and efficiency.
“We’ve been building in the same way as the Romans, with large teams of artisans on site, but we can’t keep on like that,” he says. “The engineering and architectural community has really responded, and the UK is leading the way now.”
The bid, which was delivered to the IOC’s evaluation commission in November last year, was put together by a team of 90 engineers in 13 disciplines, along with architects from three practices and other specialist professionals. It is already a ground- breaking document, being the largest single planning application in British history; if it proceeds, it will become the largest building project in Europe.
The good news for Londoners is that even if the Olympic bid is unsuccessful — and nobody is fooling themselves that such a deeply political process will be decided purely on merit — the London Development Agency is still committed to regenerating the Lea Valley along the lines drawn up for the bid.
Indeed, some of the facilities will be completed long before the 2012 Games, most notably a new aquatic centre comprising two Olympic- standard 50m pools and a 5m-deep diving pool that is due to open in 2008, on what is now a ragged patch of land off Stratford High Street. Six international architects entered a competition to design the centre last month, with a brief to come up with a versatile scheme that can be adapted to needs, whether or not London is chosen by the IOC.
The key to the concept is the idea of “legacy”, as Paul Westbury, one of the engineers involved, explains it. The vision is not so much about the six weeks of the Games themselves, but about what is left behind — which means the overall plan would work just as well without Olympic facilities.
At 36, Westbury is the youngest partner in the engineering firm Buro Happold, and has a track record of working as a structural engineer in sports stadiums, including the projected new Arsenal ground at Ashburton Grove in north London. But he is excited not so much by the stadiums as by the wider opportunities thrown up by the 2012 bid, which he sees as a catalyst for redevelopment.
“This is a fantastic opportunity to design a new piece of the city, as holistic, sustainable and self- supporting as we can make it,” he says. “This is a large-scale project with an important philosophy behind it, and we’re pushing it to the limits.”
