London 2012 Olympics: Team GB could prove lucrative for Ryan Giggs, Wayne Rooney and the BOA

Brothers in arms: Rooney and Giggs could be a big attraction for Team GB at London 2012

There are three men who are genuine considerations for the over-23 spots in the Team GB football side at the London 2012 Olympic Games.

David Beckham is a shoe-in if only for the publicity and ticket sales he will generate.

But the other two names will convert the Team GB ‘Dream Team’ into a Team GB ‘Redeem Team’. They are Wayne Rooney and Ryan Giggs.

Both have appeared in the newspapers for the wrong reasons in recent years, with front page exposure about their private pursuits not nearly as welcome as the back page coverage of their sporting heroics.

What these players do in their personal lives may ultimately be of little relevance to their football skills, but competing in the London 2012 Olympics will surely give them an opportunity to present to the world a different side to their tabloid personas.

The London Olympic organisers need to shift a million football tickets and having such high profile personalities as part of the home football side is crucial to generating publicity- good or bad.

They certainly will guide the structure of play on the pitch. The degree of influence in helping to mould a cohesive national team – welcoming Welsh players Gareth Bale and Aaron Ramsey for instance – could enhance their leadership credentials.

Commercially the role is also a winner for the players. Technically they aren't paid for their time in the Olympic team, but some players have sponsor bonuses in their contracts that could be quite lucrative. Just being able to call themselves “an Olympian'” is a motivating factor.

The BOA is also in an interesting position if these players are selected for Team GB.

The bosses have already set lofty moral standards. We have seen them remain strong in the rejection of any athlete who has served a drug suspension, but the BOA's claim that competing for Team GB is a privilege and bears with it higher ethical responsibilities could be questioned by the over-23 player nominations.

Not that the Olympic athletes village is entirely clear of sordid speculation. Inaccessible to the media and the prying eyes of inconvenient spouses, it is fuelled with reports of record condom usage – something that may even shock a professional footballer.

OPLC has questions to answer over Olympic Stadium shambles

So, the Olympic Stadium, clanger or carve-up? Nearly 72 hours after the dramatic decision to abandon months of negotiations with West Ham we have little choice to make up our own minds.

The Olympic Park Legacy Company, the key body in the process, has had three days to issue a statement or offer some explanation for why it tore up a year’s work, but has still not uttered a word.

Sports minister Hugh Robertson has spoken at length about the threat of “legal paralysis” that prompted the decision, and the OPLC communications team say that for now the Department of Culture, Media and Sport, is “taking the lead”.

Not for the first time in the tortuous and flawed history of the stadium, that is a long way from being a satisfactory response.

The Olympic Stadium is a £500m public asset that will now have at least another £95m of taxpayer money spent upgrading it so it is fit to be rented to a football club.

Given that level of public funding the events of the last few weeks deserve proper explanation from OPLC chairman Baroness Ford and chief executive Andrew Altman. Granted, the pair inherited an ill-considered mess when they took on the stadium job, but we could still do with some answers.

Throughout Ford and Altman have been adamant that their process would be robust and would deliver a tenant into the stadium and a return to the taxpayer. Yet 10 months from the Olympic opening ceremony they still can’t tell us who will be using the stadium, how many seats there will be, what facilities it will have – beyond a track – or how much the return will be.

The OPLC say that Ford may be available to discuss what happened, and what happens next, next week. Here’s a few questions she, the government and the Olympic authorities might consider

Does the “legal paralysis” explanation really hold-water?

Tottenham and Leyton Orient were challenging the terms of Newham’s £40m loan to West Ham, claiming it breached European state-aid rules But from the outset the OPLC insisted that its decisions would be water-tight and that legal challenges had been anticipated, so they should have seen it coming.

Perhaps they did. Just 10 days ago I was assured by a senior OPLC source that the Spurs-Orient challenges were “baloney” and that the legal advice was unequivocal. The OPLC would win.

So what happened to turn Tottenham and Orient’s pile of “baloney” into “legal paralysis”? Could it be that new evidence provided by Orient made it far more likely that Newham-West Ham and the OPLC would lose? Or that the anonymous complaint to the European Commission had not been anticipated?

At the very least the OPLC’s legal due diligence looks questionable. If the Newham – West Ham finance package were to be declared illegal there would be no way back for the Hammers or the OPLC.

Legal sources have told me the same lawyers, Eversheds, have advised the OPLC on the bid process and the judicial review. Little wonder then that they keep getting the same answers.

There are a couple of other possible explanations for Monday’s Olympic-class U-turn

Could it be that the 2017 World Athletics Championship bid, a priority for Sebastian Coe as well as Robertson, became the most important factor in government thinking?

You might think that a case of the tail wagging a stadium-sized dog, but don’t underestimate the importance attached to securing a meaningful athletics legacy. It has driven every step of this process

One other thought, a question that West Ham might be able to help answer. Is it possible that the OPLC feared that Karren Brady and Co were considering walking away, or at the very least re-negotiating the terms of their deal?

With the government committed to a track come what may Spurs were definitively out of the race, making West Ham the sole bidder in an uncompetitive market.

In those circumstances I would have tried to renegotiate. Maybe they did too. And maybe that’s the real reason why the OPLC is now preparing tender documents for a £2m a-year rental agreement, with West Ham at the front of the queue.

London 2012 Olympics: Government buys time for Olympic Stadium

Finally a sensible decision in what has been a drawn-out, fraught affair concerning the future of the Olympic Stadium after the London 2012 Olympic Games.

On the surface, this latest decision by the Government to collapse the sale to West Ham, retain control of the stadium in public hands and offer it out to tender on a lease arrangement appears muddled, a backward step and a costly multi million pound exercise for the taxpayer.

It certainly cements a feeling that the Olympic Park Legacy Company has been a dithering quango. But it allows the Government its most needed commodity – time. Time to decide if an athletics track, combined with rock concerts and a football tenant or two actually works. Time to host the 2017 World Athletics Championships, if London fends off rivals Doha. Time that eliminates what had been the increasing financial demands of Tottenham Hotspur in order to drop their legal challenge and the noisy machinations of Leyton Orient.

And with that time, comes the Government's most precious need: control. They had been losing control of this entire issue – especially when the European Commission was dragged into the dispute (through an anonymous complaint about Newham Council providing funding to West Ham to secure the original deal).

Some £17 million in sweeteners to Tottenham, via the Mayor, are still on offer until midnight Oct 19 for the club to drop their judicial review – a moot point now. Tottenham have won few friends at the political level for their manoeuvring and the club is likely to find strong support for West Ham if it also decides to tender for the stadium lease.

As insiders have clearly pointed out: "West Ham are making all the right noises now".

The Government is looking to rent out the stadium, which will be reconfigured to 60,000 seats from the 80,000 it will have at Games time, to a football tenant, for around £2 million a year. That leaves about £3 million a year in operating costs for the taxpayer, possibly picked up by renting out to an entertainment provider in the summer.

But any such Government subsidies might work out to be a bargain in the long run.  If the Government offers a short tenancy it means that the entire process and effectiveness of combining athletics, concerts, naming rights and football can be revisited down the track, beyond the post-Olympic Games golden aura – and reconsidered in more buoyant economic times.

In the meantime, the effectiveness and efficiencies of the OPLC will come under scrutiny for its waste of monies in this mess. The 14-strong board is led by  chair Baroness Margaret Ford  who had promised on her appointment:  "It is cast in stone that we leave a Grand Prix athletics stadium. But what I have opened the book around is the other kind of value we can add to this stadium". That promise is looking shaky indeed.

London 2012 Olympics: Do we really want drug cheats to wear the Team GB vest in London?

Hot topic: should reformed drug cheat David Millar (l) be allowed to help world champion Mark Cavendish (r) win Olympic gold in London?

The big question for British sports fans is: do you want people who have cheated, lied, sneakily pumped themselves full of drugs, not just once as a mistaken error, but in a systemised, deliberate series of actions, to represent the country?

Or is it okay that because these athletes are good at what they do (and who knows how much of this has been influenced by their previous drug-taking) that they are worthy of wearing the TeamGB vest?

Clearly the door has been opened for athletes like Dwain Chambers and David Millar to legally challenge the lifetime ban imposed by the British Olympic Association in the wake of LaShawn Merritt's successful appeal to the Court of Arbitration for Sport.

And in the end they might legally, and technically, earn the right to compete at the London 2012 Olympics. But is this morally and ethically the right thing to do?

There are lots of justifications that readers have suggested – like allowing athletes the chance for redemption, not to keep punishing them once they have served their time and perhaps, most potently, the fear that other countries will have their disgraced, duplicitous athletes competing at the London Olympics, so why not the UK?

But this last argument simply reduces the UK to the lower standards of other countries.

And why shouldn't authorities here decide the calibre of people and the appropriate standards of conduct that are worthy for such a privileged berth? Certainly the large majority of athletes believe this to be the case, and more than 95 per cent of Olympians support the BOA stance.

Yet a Telegraph poll, which elicited one of the website's most popular responses, showed that 53 per cent of readers thought Dwain Chambers should be allowed to compete at the London Olympics.

The World Anti Doping Agency had previously made an interesting pitch to CAS, saying that the reduction of sanctions for athletes who provide information about their suppliers has not been as successful as anticipated.

They had been enticing athletes to provide information about doping, the deal being that their sentences would be reduced to six months for the information.  But these sentences still fell under the International Olympic Committee's ban for the next Games (the very ban that has collapsed after the Merritt test case).

The argument, made before the Merritt ruling, was interesting because, with WADA's detection not progressing at the pace they would like, it could have been interpreted as a request for more lenient sentences for whistlebowers, which would then have allowed them to appear in London.

The Merritt ruling now keeps the incentive in place for athletes like Millar to come clean about their drug taking with the offer of possible Olympic places for those who tell the truth.

On Tuesday, UK Anti Doping is launching its "Clean Sport" mantra at Trafalgar Square, which now has a hollow note. The only certainty that will come out of this is that the nine-month lead-up to the London Olympics will be enveloped by possible legal challenges from Chambers and Millar.