London 2012: The long journey from bid to Games

As Tessa Jowell, the former Olympics minister, has articulated many times in the past, winning the right to stage the 2012 Games was actually the easy bit. Far greater was the responsibility of having to deliver them.

Paris had implied that the rival London bid was a "paper" one, with too much building work to do for the comfort of the International Olympic Committee.
It was also implied that the city faced an almost impossible challenge to get everything done in time.

London's proposition was to create a vast public park with a string of new permanent and temporary competition venues built from scratch.

The land the team had chosen was a largely run-down industrial area.

Abandoned, graffiti-daubed buildings slumbered next to sludgy, slow-moving streams, thick with years of contamination and neglect.

This imagined re-birth of the lower Lee Valley around Stratford was to happen in a capital city whose transport links were already strained to capacity.

The record on major building projects, like the Millennium Dome and Wembley Stadium, had been derided, and home-grown terrorists had rocked confidence in security.