If you enter the main entrance at Mipim, you’ll notice a couple of Polish cities are trumpeting the news they are hosting matches at this summer’s European football championships which the country is co-hosting with Ukraine.
Pop along a few hundred yards, go up some steps and into the London stand and there is zilch mention of the fact that the capital is hosting the world’s biggest sporting festival this summer. You would think there might be some reference to the fact we’re hosting the 2012 games - after all taxpayers stumped up £9 billion for the right to do so.
There isn’t because we can’t. It’s all to do with rules laid down by the IOC who are headquartered, like that other sporting behemoth FIFA, in Switzerland. Orson Welles in his famous quote about the country - “500 years of brotherly love and all it’s produced is the cuckoo clock,” he said in The Third Man - could have added jobsworth civil servants to that roster.
In a nutshell, UK firms aren’t allowed to fly the flag because it goes against the rules which say the main sponsors have first dibs on any marketing rights. After all, they stuck their hands in their pockets - so we didn’t have to reach down further - and there needs to be some sort of rules to prevent a load of chancers grabbing 2012 glory.
Rules are rules but for the London stand to not have a 2012 visibility at the major property show in Europe is madness. Same goes for the gagging order issued to architects behind these jobs.
The NLA’s Peter Murray doesn’t fume that much but, as an Aussie would say, he’s spewing. He thinks it’s madness. He’s also hacked off that Locog heavies are telling architects not to say this, not to say that because, you know, them’s the rules. Blimey, all they want to say is: “didn’t we do well.”
Olympics minister Hugh Robertson and Olympic Park Legacy chair Margaret Ford make noises about following protocol but, offered the chance, they don’t do sympathy. They knew what they were signing up for, they add. In short, stop bleating.
Robertson, who is in Mipim to, with wonderful irony, promote the fact London is staging the Olympics, was asked about whether the UK is getting into a 2012 fever. “We’re getting more excited. In the UK, we come to parties quite late and we tend to go over the top and the Olympics is no different.”
Still, perhaps we should ask the IOC and Locog official permission first before we’re allowed to start jumping up and down.
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