The Olympics Scam

"The defining image of this era – Bob Hoskins (in the movie) with his sleek pleasure craft moored in St Katharine Docks, Margaret Thatcher schmoozing the Reichmann brothers in Canary Wharf – is the maquette of the proposed marina, the city of towers. A Lilliputian theme park of unimaginable wealth creation. A DIY anticipation of computer-generated presentations for the Olympic wonderlands. ‘Water City’, a new Venice (without the memory-mud of centuries), will rise from the stinking filth of back rivers and green-scum canals.

Keeffe’s ‘Corporation’, a confederacy of villains, is a direct translation of alliances in contemporary political life. Hoskins, a pumped-up Dalston Mussolini, presenting himself as ‘a businessman with a sense of history’, spiels his pitch as the oligarch’s gin-palace powers under Tower Bridge. Thirty years on and he could be making his final plea as a candidate in the London Mayoral Election, right across the river from the crumpled buttock of City Hall. Which is neither a hall, nor in the City, but an architectural doodle with the perverse ambition of bringing Manhattan to Bermondsey. ‘We’ve got mile after mile and acre after acre of land for our future prosperity,’ Bob drools. ‘It’s important that the right people mastermind the new London.’

The scam of scams was always the Olympics: Berlin in 1936 to Beijing in 2008. Engines of regeneration. Orgies of lachrymose nationalism. War by other means. Warrior-athletes watched, from behind dark glasses, by men in suits and uniforms. The pharmaceutical frontline. Rogue Californian chemists running their eye-popping, vein-clustered, vest-stripping robots against degendered state laboratory freaks. Bearded ladies and teenage girls who never have periods. Medals returned by disgraced drug cheats to be passed on to others who weren’t caught, that time. The Millennium Dome fiasco was a low-rent rehearsal. The holy grail for blue-sky thinkers was the sport-transcends-politics Olympiad, the five-hooped golden handcuffs, the smoke rings behind which deals could be done for casinos and malls: with corporate sponsorship, flag-waving and infinitely elastic budgets (any challenge an act of naysaying treason)..."