Daily Sport: I want the Olympics to work but not at this price

By Alex Story

The Olympic Games saved my life. By the time I was 14, I had already been kicked out of three schools. My father grabbed me by the collar and told me I needed discipline. One Saturday he sent me to my local rowing club. From that point on I never looked back. I loved training and my team mates. Together we started dreaming of gold and glory. Pretty soon, I started to set my sights on the Olympics.

I remember thinking that if I died the day after winning the gold at the Olympics I would have lived a good life and done our country proud. What I wasn’t to know is how pen-pushers and bureaucrats would use the sportsman’s Holy Grail to hammer the hard working man.   We were initially told that the London 2012 Games would cost £2.4 billion and that the funds would come largely from the Lottery. Now we get a better but still hazy picture. The cost will be nearer £10 billion for the two week carnival. That is a third of what our boys in the army get from Gordon Brown every year, and they have been left fighting terrorists in Afghanistan without helicopters or proper equipment.

The problem is that this money for 2012 is going to come from you and me.  You can be sure that the cost will rise even more in the next few years as the deadline approaches and our incompetent bureaucrats start feeling the heat. It’s not just the costs of the actual games that will go sky high. It’ll also be the inflation costs on buying and building properties as the TaxPayers' Alliance has shown, adding an extra £4 billion. And to think that we once ruled the biggest Empire in the world on a shoe string!

Hard-working Britons are going to wake up from the celebration in five years time with a huge headache: a massive tax bill. I want the Olympics project to work but currently signs are not good.  I just hope that our kids will still be able benefit from the hope of Olympic glory as I did.

Alex Story, who rowed for Great Britain at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, is a spokesman for the TaxPayers' Alliance 2012 Watchdog, www.taxpayersalliance.com