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.

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.

London 2012 Olympics: putting the new Olympic track to the test

Today I ran on the London 2012 Olympic track – that sea of red rubber that will next year bear the weight of much faster, skilled and experienced champions such as Usain Bolt, Tyson Gay, Allison Felix and Sally Pearson.

On the start line of the 100m I was trying to channel them all. I had the obligatory chain around my neck (how do they race with jewellery swinging like a pendulum?) and  I attempted to concentrate, while being fitted with a video camera on my head: keep head down, power off the track, pump arms.

That was until the starters, Seb Coe and Hugh Robertson decided it would be a 400m race – actually 500m. So my moment on the track became a concerted jog all the way around to take in the atmosphere of an empty stadium that appeared anything but soul-less.

This Olympic Stadium is cosy, with the seating at ground level creating a feeling of intimacy other 80,000 capacity stadiums lack. All of the seats were covered with biodegradable seat covers to keep them pristine, but it had the impact of softening the black seats to grey – which looked classy. The infield was green, and throwing circles still filled with water to ensure levels.

Down the back straight there was a particularly robust headwind that had swirled around to a sidewind by the front straight. If the London Olympic organisers want world records at the stadium they may have to rethink the stadium wrap that currently features a bunting style twisted triangle look, rather than a solid wrap.

Yet a couple of stadium workers revealed that while it has been quite windy on most days over the past few months the prevailing direction has tended to be a tailwind for the 100m sprinters.

Earlier in the day Ato Boldon rightly pointed out to me that as a civilian I wouldn't know much about the hardness of the track or its technical abilities, but I did ask the experts, the Mondo company specialists who spent 75 days laying it down. And what they said Ato won't like. Instead of being rock hard for the sprinters so that they can notch up slick world records, the track has been made slightly softer to deal with the complaints of distance runners who previously found the Mondo track injury-inducing.

So how did it feel? Well through my joggers (no high heels or spikes allowed) the track felt much harder than I anticipated, less spongy than the tartan tracks I had experienced, but surprisingly it offered quite a bit of bounce. Mondo project manager Joe Hoekstra described the track nap as being manufactured to produce a rebound – almost like a rubber band being stretched.

He said while the endurance runners won't be disappointed, the sprinters will have finished their race before they even think about it. So while I puffed a bit more than I wanted, I got the chance to see more than I expected. This was one experience I didn't want to finish too soon.

London 2012 Olympics: Government and Boris should lobby IOC for more British media passes

The Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, has taken umbrage at the lack of local newspaper journalists with accreditation for the London 2012 Olympic Games.

This week, when the International Olympic Committee is in London for its penultimate inspection of the Olympic planning process, Johnson will, hopefully, lobby the Lausanne-based mandarins for more media access.

At the moment the numbers of British print journalists and photographers given accreditation to cover the London Olympics is 530.  That number includes the 90 journalists and photographers from the Press Association, which is committed to providing all of the regional and local newspapers with  extensive coverage.

If we break it down further, the number of  journalists for the whole of  Britain's newspaper industry with "E" accreditations  (unlimited access) is just 270 .

Now let's see. Pick another country, say China. How many journalist and photographer accreditations do they have?  It's 500. Roughly the same.  So for a country with limited media freedom the numbers of accreditations are in line with Britain, which has the most robust competitive media market in the world.

The IOC will say that they have slashed the numbers of accreditations for China, as well as other countries like the USA and Australia compared with the Beijing Olympics. This in order to boost the numbers for Britain, who's total is about double the norm for an away Games. But the numbers are still pitifully low.

Locog and the IOC repeatedly say there are 27,000 journalists covering the London 2012 Olympics. But most of these are broadcast technicians, working behind the scenes ensuring the global television coverage reaches the four billion viewers. The total number of newspaper journalists and photographers from across the world is capped at just 5,500 because this is the total number London organisers factor in their provision of media services.

I have been on a committee for the British Olympic Association (along with other representatives from national, regional and photographic media) to try to decide how the accreditations are distributed. It hasn't been easy.

Over 4,000 applications were received, meaning just one in eight was successful. Essentially, priority was given to publications which face constant deadlines.  Some of the weekly newspapers and specialist magazines have a more intimate relationship with the athletes and don't need such immediate access to interviews after a race. Johnson is lobbying for these titles, and rightly so.

Perhaps the Olympics Minister,  Hugh Robertson, should be in there too, lobbying for far greater access for all of the print media in this country.

London 2012 Olympics: Smart phone strategy needed to secure memorable Games

What will everyone be saying about London and how the city coped with hosting the Olympic Games when it comes to 2013 or 2023?

Will it be that the city, a global financial centre, didn't miss a beat? That the Olympics saved the British economy? Tourists flocked to London? The transport system heaved but coped?

While transport and security are the two big unknowns, the Mayor of London Boris Johnson last week noted what he thought was a real reputational risk to the city – communications. He highlighted his concerns about the increasing reliance on smart phone technology and the challenges the city faces in keeping up with that demand as well as the exponential pressures hosting the Olympic Games will put on the communications systems.

His nightmare could be the world thinking: "London Olympics was a communications disaster."

Johnson is right, because the main commentators and journalists who arrive in London from afar rely on that technology and if it doesn't work adequately the whole world will know.

The London organisers haven't helped matters by charging each journalist £150 for computer access at the Olympic venues. So the first story written about London will be how WiFi and computer access is expensive. That fact, coupled with the constant phone drop outs in the middle of the city, even now, ahead of the Games, give potential for widespread negativity.

But as historians well know, the further in the past an event is, the larger the discrepancies of the facts are. In the past eight months at various breakfasts and conferences there has been a revision of history of previous Olympics and the reputational risks they encountered. The Sydney 2000 Olympics boosted the city’s tourism or caused dramatic falls in tourist numbers, depending on the speakers point of view. Atlanta was, according to various politicians and experts, a complete disaster because of the traffic congestion. And Beijing, despite its spectacular opening ceremony, couldn't attract crowds to the competition.

That all of these statements are incorrect matters for naught. As London will experience, it is the perception rather than the reality that is important.

Sydney did suffer a small drop in tourism numbers the following year because of the 9/11 terror attacks. Atlanta's traffic was not a problem, it was the hub and spoke system of transporting athletes that caused issues, and the city's reputation collapsed because of poor technology, a failure to control street vendors and the pipe bombing. As for Beijing, tickets were officially sold out – just as they are for London – but some events had a poor turnout of Communist Party officials from distant regions, who had been given corporate tickets, while government security fears restricted access to some open events like the road race.

All of this means, of course, that London officials need to make sure their communications system is robust enough to deal with the spike during the Olympics. Johnson is talking positively, saying he is confident all well be well. He knows, at the very least, to make it appear as if London is coping.

London 2012 Olympics: Games fails to provide benefit to sports clubs

A key body of sports clubs around the country has called on the Government to implement small, immediate tax breaks because the impact of the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games has failed to filter down to the grass roots.

While sports clubs around the country should be harnessing the drive and inspiration of a home Olympic Games, a recent survey shows the opposite is true, with the vast majority of sports clubs not realising any kind of Games opportunity, let alone one to expand and nurture a new generation of sporting youth.

Survey results of 2000 sports clubs conducted by the Sport and Recreation Alliance shows a surprising 84 per cent of clubs do not expect any benefit from London hosting the Games. It appears that only a small pocket of clubs, some of which are based in London and receiving some of the Mayor of London's £15 million sporting facilities and sports participation grants, are realising any Olympic Games-related benefits.

Chief executive of the Sport and Recreation Alliance, Tim Lamb, said that "the results do not come as a surprise" and grass roots sports officials say the reason is simple: a distinct lack of volunteers and the lack of a lasting legacy from many of the temporary, and some of the permanent Games venues.

"We are disappointed that 84 per cent of clubs do not see the Olympic and Paralympic Games as an opportunity," Lamb said.

"However, this does not come as a surprise. We've been highlighting just how vital legacy is to the future of sports clubs. Despite this discouraging news, the Alliance is focusing on practical ways to help clubs."

Lamb said the Government should allow community amateur sports clubs the ability to claim Gift Aid on the subscriptions paid to them by junior members. He said this would be a simple way to keep money in community sport, was cheap and put sports clubs on a par with other organisations.

"This is a simple change, which would keep money in community sport without costing much," he said.

"It could save hundreds of clubs from the risk of closure and enable the country to build a sporting legacy."

Graham Hall, an athletics coach at the New Marske Harriers athletics club in Cleveland, said his club had a good base of 250 members but was struggling to attract volunteers to coach and take on administrative tasks. He said the club had a core group of 10 volunteers, with another 20 available to help host events but this was "the thin blue line".

"At this stage we have discussed putting new members on a waiting list unless they can bring a parent along to help," Hall said.

He said the problem wasn't so much the inspiration of the Olympics – which had resulted in the members training harder and being motivated by the Games – but rather attracting people to help with the monitoring, checks and administration.

"What we are doing (volunteering) to get away from work suddenly looks a lot like work," he said, referring to Key Performance Indicators required with grant monies.

Neal Underwood, the chairman of the Sharks Canoe club in Middlesex said the club had no direct benefits from the Games and didn't expect any. He said the permanent whitewater facility at Lea Valley was to turn into a tourism attraction after the Games with rental rates so high (£400 an hour) that it was prohibitive for training youngsters.

"The Olympic money is generating around the elite athletes but it doesn't filter down to the youngsters or to help the youngsters, it seems that there is no strategic overall plan that links the elite and grass roots," he said.