23 January 2007
Tony Blair and Lord Coe have promised that the 2012 Olympics will be the most environmentally friendly and sustainable yet. The pair discuss progress for the Games in a special podcast as a milestone in reached in the preparations - there are now 2012 days to go before the event begins.
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Seb Coe:
HI. I am Seb Coe, I am Chairman of London 2012, the Organising Committee that is charged with staging the Games in London in 2012, 64 years after the last opportunity we had to do that, and I am about to speak to the Prime Minister to bring him up to speed with the progress that we have made since Singapore, 16 - 17 months ago. It is 2012 days, that is 2012 days before the opening ceremony on July 27 2012. I just think it is barely conceivable that it has only been 19 months since we were in Singapore.
Prime Minister:
It is incredible to think back on it and realise what a monumental thing it was to have won the bid, and then the amount of work that has actually been done from then to now. But I think it has been a hugely energising and motivating thing for the country, it is interesting that so many people still support it and whatever, I think that people will stick with it and realise that it is a tremendous showcase for the country. But then actually what is happening around the site itself, and the development and regeneration that is going to happen, I mean it is a reason all of itself for making this worthwhile.
Seb Coe:
Yes it is a very good point because I had the, it is difficult sometimes to explain visually to people how much work has already taken place in the last 14 months. I was lucky enough just a few days ago to fly across the site in a helicopter. It is a site about the size of Hyde Park, it is for all intents and purposes levelled, there is Stratford International Railway Station in the middle, which is going to form the focal part of the transportation system. We can move 250,000 people an hour by rail in and out of the Olympic Park, and we have got at this very moment, there are 450 people working on this on site, and 8 drilling rigs and it is a big complex project but we are making very good progress.
Prime Minister:
The idea is to make this as environmentally sustainable as possible, and as I understand it the concept is that when we build it we try and reduce the carbon emissions by 50% or try to get even further than that.
Seb Coe:
Yes, and we can do that by working with Building Regulations. Sydney raised the bar on this in 2000, they really did come to the table for the first time with an Olympic Games with a Games that was really based on some very sound environmental and issues of sustainability We think we can raise the bar again in this and we can do things in for instance the Olympic Village, we will be in the Olympic Village and at games time it will be zero waste. We are working to reduce carbon emission all the time by the way we design. One of the things actually that is often overlooked of course is that because the Olympic Village has to serve both Olympians and Paralympians, when that Village gets handed on - to targeting key workers, nurses, doctors, young professionals.
Prime Minister:
That is right, as it is redeveloped, we are going to fill the key worker housing.
Seb Coe:
Yes, 30 - 40% of that will be targeted towards key workers, which is very important, as you know, well know, in that part of London. But because the Village has to serve both, Olympians and Paralympians, it will built to some of the highest standards ever, that has ever come together in a construction project in terms of accessibility. So there will be some things that we are able to do over the next few years that will never have been witnessed at an Olympic Games, and fits into the public agenda at the moment.
Prime Minister:
Yeah, I think that if it is clear that, as it were, you have not just got the greenest Games ever, because obviously the technology is changing and we can use the building regulations and you get significant reductions in carbon, but also if we are able to showcase within the development of the Olympics and the way it is run some of thing the things that are possible now for people to do if they make the right choices and decisions, I think that that cutting edge example of sustainability will be important as well.
Seb Coe:
I think that is true. And what has been interesting is that when we started out in this whole process, the first feasibility work that was being done in 1997 about London or the UK bidding again to stage a Games, I doubt whether probably one letter in 5 or 600 was dealing with anything related to the built environment and some of the environmental issues. Our postbag at London 2012 now probably has as much environmental and sustainability content as almost any other area of interest at the moment.
Prime Minister:
People are getting in touch with you and saying well how are you going to make sure that this is being done in an environmentally responsible way?
Seb Coe:
Exactly, and every time, we use public forums a lot of the time to get some of our messages across and bring people up to speed, particularly locally, about what we are doing, and some of the disruption that there will be in their communities, but so much of the questioning is about the environment in which they want to bring their children up and have their families in over the next 30 - 40 years. And that chimes in very closely of course with what we said in Singapore, that this wasn’t just bidding for 60 days of glorious sport and then moving ahead as normal.
Prime Minister:
I mean the regeneration afterwards, there will be facilities but then there will be houses, and I mean several, there will be thousands of people who obviously will be employed in constructing it, but then there will be an aftermath as well, won’t there, there will be an immediate legacy where there will be further construction and we are looking at how many homes and so on for people?
Seb Coe:
Well that again is for local boroughs and obviously government to think about. But for instance we are building an Olympic Village and the Village will cater for 10,000 Olympians, 4,500 Paralympians. It is a private construction project and we will lease the Village back during the Games and then afterwards the commercial market will then sell them out, but as I have said 30 - 40% of that will be targeted towards key workers. So there is a very, very strong legacy there, but alongside that, if you were going to hope that people would come into a regenerated area they are also going to want to come into an area where the rivers are clean and they have got greenfield sites and all that sort of stuff. So in essence we are leaving the largest urban park behind anywhere in Europe for the last 200 years. It is a complex project and the regeneration occurs at so many different tiers, alongside world-class facilities, but world-class facilities that we want to be able to return in a sensible way to the community. So for instance the athletics, the Olympic Stadium will be 85,000 seats at Games time, but the thinking at the moment is to reduce that to about 20,000, to have a tracking field legacy, but also a community base that allows local communities to use to perhaps have a centre of excellence for schools sport, to be able to use creatively the undercroft of the stadium, to have other sports use that facility at the same time and not leave communities just only barely able to press their noses up against facilities.
Prime Minister:
But it is also true, isn’t it, that around the country now there are all sorts of events that are going to tie in with the Olympics. I mean they will be doing things up in Glasgow I know, but also in different parts of the country to try and get everyone involved and making people realise that this is an important activity for the whole of the country and not just for London.
Seb Coe:
It is vital. And you would remember from working with us during the bid process, you know we always made the point that yes of course this is the London Games but it is a UK-wide project. And we have just talked, we have talked about sport and we have talked about regeneration, but of course there is a cultural Olympiad. We go, next year we go to Beijing, we get 8 minutes in their closing ceremony, which gives us an opportunity - 4 years out - to start telling the rest of the world what we are going to do with the Olympic Games. And that is the point when really the Cultural Olympiad kicks off for four years, and we want communities the length and breadth of the country involved in a celebration over the four years of the fact that we will be having the Games, and that will be in many of the cultural platforms.
Prime Minister:
Yes, once the Flame really passes to us after Beijing.
Seb Coe:
That is the big intake of breath, it is our turn next.
Prime Minister:
It really is then, because even now, and for the past couple of years, there has been a focus on Beijing, what is happening there, there have been events around it. So I think that is also important to emphasise that you know after the Beijing Games conclude in 2008 there will then be a 4 year period in which we are as it were the …
Seb Coe:
Centre of attention?
Prime Minister:
Yeah, the centre of attention, the representative of the Olympic spirit and which we can then use also to galvanise interest and enthusiasm in this country and outside.
Seb Coe:
Yes, and there are formally and legally things that we can only do after the Games in Beijing have been and gone. But for instance in 2010 we will be launching our Volunteer Programme. We need probably 70,000, maybe more, volunteers. And to tap into the point you have just made, they are not all going to come from London, we don’t want them all to come from London, we want the UK being reflected.
Prime Minister:
So volunteers, I mean if people want to volunteer they will be able to do that from different parts of the country?
Seb Coe:
Yes absolutely. I mean interestingly by the time we got back from Singapore, I think within sort of 3 or 4 months we had got about 70,000 hits on the website. Just a few months ago we celebrated the 100,000th volunteer who had actually registered with us. Now they are not all going to be appropriate or applicable at the time and we have to go through a very detailed process of making sure, because some of those tasks are quite complicated, you know there is security, you know they are involved in venue management, but it is a great opportunity for the whole of the UK to get involved.
Prime Minister:
Well it is interesting you know just going around different parts of the UK, already you will visit schools or you will see youngsters doing sport and some of them obviously, because it is still five and a half years away, are contemplating the prospect that they will be there. I mean it must as an experience, it is like none other I assume that you will ever have in your life?
Seb Coe:
It is difficult to describe. I was recently in Australia and I went to the Olympic Park in Sydney where some of our youth Olympians are preparing for the Australian Olympic Festival that is about to start. And I sat chatting to some 12 year old gymnasts who as far as they are concerned, five years is just round the corner, I mean they have got the great opportunity of doing something I don’t think they ever dreamed of being able to do in their own backyard. And when I thought about an Olympic Games at the age of 12 and 13, it never occurred to me that I would be doing it in front of a home crowd, it was always I would be in some remote part of the world.
And interestingly I spoke also to some headmasters the other day, some head teachers, and we have no, we will get the numbers and we will look at it in quite a scientific way, but they are beginning to report to me that they are getting a lot of requests from youngsters and parents in the schools to be able to expose some of the youngsters to Olympic sports that they may never have even witnessed on their own, Olympic sports I have never seen before. But of course we need to field full teams in 2012. And they are also noticing, they are beginning to notice, it is early days, but some of the truancy figures and things like that are beginning to change slightly, certainly since Singapore.
Prime Minister:
I was just thinking back, you know we were talking forward to this about Olympic memories and so on, it is an amazing experience and you reminded me of my going to the Athens Olympics, which was the first Olympic Games I ever attended. And the thing that is most extraordinary is that you get a sense of the scale and the spirit of it but also everywhere I went I saw its transformative impact on the city, but also the country, and the incredible impact it had to present, you know in this case it was Greece and Athens, to the whole of the world. You know that is your moment in international terms and I found it the most convincing argument I have come across as to why it was for us to try and do it.
Seb Coe:
I know you are right because I recently went to Barcelona, which was an extraordinary Games. But in Barcelona the Mayor and the political leaders and the cultural leaders in that city now openly refer to Barcelona as having two histories: the history of Barcelona pre the 1992 Games; and then the history afterwards. And I was shown projects that are still, that have only just started, that simply would not have started had the Games not come to Barcelona in terms of regeneration, the fact that before 1992 the average person living in Barcelona could not actually even access their own beaches. They took three to four square miles of derelict wharf land, they built the Olympic Village which is now a very very nice part of the city to live in. Some of the urban planning projects that were built into the Games have delivered in a way that I don’t think anybody dared believe was possible in Barcelona. And Sydney was the same. The Australians will tell you that actually they came of age in 2000 when the Games showcased them.
Prime Minister:
Well that is the thing to aim for. But you know I have reflected back, just to go back to where we started, I have reflected often on the extraordinary events in Singapore and with all the difficulties and challenges there are, I haven’t for a single moment regretted going for it, and indeed in one way I am more convinced than ever that it is just one of the most important things for our country, for its sense of itself and its own pride and culture that will happen to us in the years to come.
So good luck with it
Seb Coe:
Thank you. It is a long road but we will get there.