The last time the Olympics came to London, in 1948, Britain was building a welfare state. Sixty-three years later they are knocking it down. In this brazenly market-driven and self‑preserving phase of our history it could be that a vast national experience might revive the communal spirit that shaped society in the post-war years. For 17 days, at least.
Where do the British go now to feel a shared collective glow: Glastonbury? Or the TV screen to unite around a talent contest or The Apprentice? The 2012 Olympic and Paralympic hosts no longer coalesce around politics or religion but in pursuit of mass entertainment, which the Games have always claimed to be. The self‑declared "Greatest Show on Earth" offers an engulfing wave of pleasure and distraction as well as the perfect personal showcasing opportunity for David Beckham.
With the Olympic family now seeming as wholesome as The Waltons, compared to Fifa, London 2012 has been served a chance to strive for something higher than geopolitical ambition of the sort we endured in Beijing three years ago. A tall order, you may think, in a land where civil war erupts over the formation of a GB football team, but on all known precedent the British are exceptionally good at throwing themselves into international carnivals staged on these shores.
London is staging next year's Games by accident. The shock bidding race victory over Paris landed politicians and organisers with the formidable task of inflating a toytown budget to a more honest level and actually piecing together an infrastructure capable of accommodating 26 sports across 34 venues, 10,500 athletes and double that number of accredited media. If we all paired off, each runner, swimmer and wrestler could have two personal journalists to record every grunt and grimace.
When Paris acquired the lemon‑sucking countenance of the beaten red-hot favourite, supporters of London's bid formed two camps. One saw the Olympics as an opportunity to drive through the regeneration of London's East End and the Lower Lea Valley while reviving sport in state schools. The other, more hedonistic group, thought watching beach volleyball in Horse Guards Parade would be a giggle and confer on Britain some vague international glamour, yeah.
In the event the country finds itself constructing a sporting Disneyland at the time of draconian cuts to public spending. Many of us would rather have the Games of 1948 again with people cutting up old bed-sheets to make running shorts if it meant improvements to the NHS, schools and public services, but the universe we now inhabit is one of sob-inducingly high ticket prices and £400,000 Olympic logo design costs.
These will be my fifth Games as a reporter. A uniting theme is that Messianic pre-event sermons seldom result in long-term improvements for the population or their environment. Atlanta, in 1996, was the Games of corporate shock and awe, with Coca‑Cola the exclusive drink at all venues and bus drivers from Philadelphia who had never been to Georgia. But this was also the circus where Michael Johnson's 200 metres world record rampage of 19.32sec achieved the kind of instant televisual intensity that has become the emblem of modern sport.
Individual brilliance and drug busts: these are the two constants of Olympic competition. Atlanta was the Games where Ireland's Michelle Smith won three golds in the pool before being caught two years later trying to tamper with a urine sample to head off disgrace. Sydney 2000, where the fly-blown outback dunny was a theme of the opening ceremony, was the fortnight of Steve Redgrave's fifth rowing gold, Cathy Freeman's breakthrough for Aboriginal Australians and the cheating heart of Marion Jones, who was fuelled by tetrahydrogestrinone.
Athens 2004 sent the media army scurrying after Konstantinos Kenteris and Ekaterini Thanou, who cited a motorcycle accident nobody saw for their failure to attend a dope test. Then came Kelly Holmes's victories in the 800m and 1500m and Paula Radcliffe's operatic collapse in the women's marathon. Four years later it was reported that 21 of the 22 facilities built for the Games were abandoned or derelict: a "legacy" the creaking Greek economy is in no position to correct.
Beijing 2008 felt like an endless memo to the rest of the world, and America especially. This would be the Chinese century. The Games unfolded in secure compounds of spectacular architecture, high fences and choreographed gratification. Here we observed market capitalism coexist with authoritarian one-party rule and Michael Phelps weigh himself down with eight swimming golds while Usain Bolt extended the boundaries of human capabilities with his 100m-200m double.
So when the rhetoric is hacked away the abiding memories are of transcendent achievement, by Johnson, Redgrave, Phelps or Bolt. With its cult of "togetherness", the Olympics conceal their strongly individualistic origins. The happy-family spirit is a modern addition – and it works, often, by jerking the western mind out of its narrow obsession with fame and power. Away from our own funded culture, athletes are overcoming immense economic and cultural obstacles simply to be able to say they competed at the Games.
The Olympics' biggest single asset is that they are a convention of the whole sporting world, unlike the World Cup, where only the 32 best countries assemble. You never see hundreds of footballers flooding the host city once the tournament is over to rejoice and engage with the locals. Below the top tier of stardom, London will be another epic compendium of stories, of modest but earnestly pursued hopes.
For the grotesque cost to be in any way justified, London will have to be a much better city when it ends on 12 August for those who live and work there, and opportunities in sport will need to be more widely spread, beyond privilege and money. A government that emotes about the obesity-busting potential of next year's fiesta tried to withdraw £162m funding for the popular schools sport partnership until an outcry forced a backtrack. In 1948 they would have been the enemies of progress and fairness.
