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danpalmer

I live next to the olympic park in Stratford and it's pretty great.

- The main stadium is now the local football team's home ground and gets used for concerts as well.

- The olympic pool is an open public pool that anyone can use and looks like it gets a fair amount of use.

- The park itself is a nice open space to be in with lots more flats and shops being built in and around it.

- I have several colleagues who train at the velodrome.

- The athletes housing created thousands of new flats that, are pretty much filled and provided a lot of homes for low income families.

I really like living in Stratford and I don't think I would like it anywhere near as much if the olympics hadn't been there.

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Another thing from the article that struck me as good for London is how little it costed compared to the others

> The games set back Sochi $51 billion, London $11.6 billion and Beijing at least $40 billion

That is no small amount, I wonder how much of it was corruption and bad management.

Corruption played a big part, but Sochi had zero infrastructure at the start, it all had to be built from wholecloth, and Beijing need to transform large parts of an existing city to become an international showpiece. London already has incredible infrastructure and is already iconic. It seems that the strategy the London Olympics really used was to simply extend off of the existing systems in place and build up in a cheap area bringing new economic development to that area instead of trying to retrofit the city core.

I believe they purposely "underspent" to not waste money as well, and remember a Chinese friend commenting on how quaint the ceremonies/facilities were. Turns out we should be aiming for London, rather than Beijing.

My friends and I were joking before that Olympics that organizing it was just writing a bunch of letters. To Wimbledon for tennis courts, to FA for Wembeley, etc. Others were probably building from scratch.

The olympic whitewater course at Lee valley is also heavily used and a great facility.

The facilities built for the 2012 Olympic sailing at Weymouth are now home of the National Sailing Academy, and are really well used. In fact I'll be there this weekend with my son along with about 200 other young sailors.

http://www.wpnsa.org.uk/

Even living in a different part of London (Wimbledon), we have the benefits of reusing the equipment. 200 tonnes of sand and the nets from the beach volleyball event were used to make two new beach volleyball courts in Wimbledon Park which are used all the time.

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