Unrevised transcript of evidence taken before

The Select Committee on Olympic and Paralympic Legacy

Inquiry on

OLYMPIC AND PARALYMPIC LEGACY

Evidence Session No. 7 Heard in Public Questions 109 - 119

THURSDAY 27 JUNE 2013

10 am

Witness: David Luckes

USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT

1. This is an uncorrected transcript of evidence taken in public and webcast on www.parliamentlive.tv.

2. Any public use of, or reference to, the contents should make clear that neither Members nor witnesses have had the opportunity to correct the record. If in doubt as to the propriety of using the transcript, please contact the Clerk of the Committee.

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1

Members present

Lord Harris of Haringey (Chairman) Earl of Arran Baroness Billingham Baroness King of Bow Lord Moynihan Lord Stoneham of Droxford Baroness Wheatcroft Lord Wigley ______

Witness

David Luckes, author of the original London 2012 Games feasibility study and former Head of Sport Competition at LOCOG

Q109 The Chairman: Good morning and thank you very much for joining us. We are expecting at least one other member of the Committee to join us, but they will crash in at some point just as you are considering an answer. This is a public session and an uncorrected transcript of it will be given to you with an opportunity to make any corrections of fact. In the mean time, however, we will put the uncorrected transcript on to the website, so this is an incentive for you to make any corrections as quickly as possible.

We are being webcast as well today, for those people who are following us in that degree of detail.

We know that you were very involved in the preparation of the bid right from the outset.

Perhaps you would just sketch through fairly briefly what you see as being the origins of the

London 2012 bid; why previous UK bids to host the Olympic Games were unsuccessful and, therefore, how the 2012 bid was different; and at what point in the process you felt that the bid became credible.

David Luckes: When I was approached by Craig Reedie, who was then chair of the British

Olympic Association, in February 1997, I was a competing athlete in hockey, so I was playing. 2

I was a member of the BOA’s Athletes’ Commission and because this was pre-Lottery funding, I was looking for employment or looking for something certainly to do to fill up the

CV. So Craig phoned me and asked if I was prepared to do a three-month analysis free of charge for the BOA, looking at the bidding cities for 2004. This was on the basis of previous bids from Birmingham for 1992, and Manchester for 1996 and 2000.

Craig explained that the National Olympic Committee, which comprises members of all the sports represented in the BOA, had decided that the next bid would come from London for a number of reasons, not least because of the feedback from the people who were the key constituents—namely, the IOC members—that they wanted to see a London bid. The world had moved on a little bit from the late 1980s when Birmingham was bidding, when you had Belgrade, Brisbane, Amsterdam, Paris—a number of good cities—and there was a feeling that the Olympic movement, having gone through Barcelona, Atlanta and Sydney, now was a property that a lot of people wanted to see go to more major cities and cities with the infrastructure that could deliver an event of that size. So I was asked to do that initial three-month feasibility study, then asked to remain for another three months and then kept on full-time, albeit doing a number of other roles within the British Olympic Association.

The Chairman: Are you able to tell us at what point you thought the bid moved from being a pipedream to one that was becoming credible?

David Luckes: If truth be told, between 1997 and 2000 it was difficult to see how London could mount a viable bid when you did not have a unified local authority structure. It was only when the Greater London Authority and the Mayor’s Office were established that there was a single point of reference and a single point of contact for people looking to put forward a coherent bid against other world-renowned cities. So until 2000 I do not think it was a bid that had any particular legs, but then that was not the process of the evaluation. It was really to look at what it was required to do and look at how other cities were 3 approaching it. Back in 1997 when I was first brought on, they had not even determined the

2004 Olympic Games city; that was determined in September 1997 and went to Athens. On that basis, it was felt that the 2008 Games would not come back to Europe, so it gave a little bit of leeway and people were not even beginning to talk about anything until 2012.

Following the establishment of the Greater London Authority and the introduction of the

Mayor, things became easier because you did have that single reference point, but there was still a concern on two fronts: the lack of venues and facilities in the capital, especially indoor facilities capable of staging the number of indoor sports—14—that you have to put on for the Olympic Games. But through that process the Dome and, more importantly, ExCeL, the first phase, came on stream, which back in 1997/1998 were only in the planning phases. So there was more basic infrastructure that gave an element of credibility to a potential bid.

There was still the concern that you needed to make the bid as compact as possible in order to give you the best chance of winning it in a competitive environment, and that is why there was the development of an East London option and a West London option tied to the travel distances and travel times.

When the bid was then formulated and set up in June 2003, there was a view that we still needed to do more work in terms of the use of existing, temporary and, in what probably now is a very overused phrase, “iconic locations” to give that mix. So I think it became viable through that process.

I think when it became credible was probably following the Evaluation Commission visit in

2005, when we moved from being a probably clear third place city, following the report in

2004, to a city that had a vision and a concept that was technically viable but also technically attractive to the international federations and the people we spoke to within the

International Olympic Committee.

The Chairman: So really in the last six months. 4

David Luckes: I would say that the momentum shifted following that Evaluation Commission visit and the report that came out following that, yes.

Q110 Lord Moynihan: Can we just back up to your consideration of the two options that you just mentioned—namely, the West London Games and the East London option? Could you advise the Committee why the East London option was eventually chosen as the preferred location for the bid? Do you think there could have been a West London bid? In your initial work, did you feel that there was sufficient merit in taking the West London bid forward, and what was the determining factor that led to the consideration going to

East London?

David Luckes: Casting the mind back to the late 1990s—and I was thinking about this last night and had to go back and have a look at some old diaries to work out the chronology of many of these issues—initially it was going to be a West London-based bid. That was purely around the fact that, at that time, Wembley Stadium was being developed as a national stadium for athletics, rugby league and football, which all had equal status and equal standing within that process. So we would have had an 80,000-seat stadium with an athletics track, and I believe it was written into the brief for that that, should there be an Olympic bid from

London, Wembley would be the centre point, so we worked on that basis initially.

As the discussions over the athletics track went on and the permanent provision of an athletics facility within Wembley faded away somewhat and certain other solutions, such as a platform solution for the 2005 World Championships in Athletics, were mooted, there was a discussion over whether you should take the money that you would put into a very costly platform solution and build a new stadium for the World Championships in Athletics at

Picketts Lock. That then split very much the focus of what I was looking at, which was the feasibility, because Wembley suddenly was not as viable. Also, if then there was a stadium to be built either at Picketts Lock or, potentially, somewhere in East London, that changed the 5 dynamic and changed the environment for us from that compact Games—because in the

East we had ExCeL and the Millennium Dome—to big facilities and also big areas of land that we felt we could use.

We did a lot of work with the London Planning Advisory Council, which was the forerunner for what then moved into the Greater London Authority. They did an assessment of

51 sites around both East and West London, and the determining criterion for that was proximity to either a stadium in Stratford or a stadium in Wembley. What came from that was that there were a number of greenfield development sites in West London that were potential options—and again this is a very high-level study that was done—but in

East London there was a stronger number of brownfield development sites.

The sites in West London that came out top of the study—and it was done according to various factors and weightings—were: Northolt Aerodrome, and whilst there was support from the council there was no guarantee that the Ministry of Defence would consider releasing that; Southall Gasworks, which was a brownfield site and, in some ways, quite an attractive one from a regeneration standpoint; and then RAF Uxbridge, which was the third site. In the East it was: Stratford rail lands; a combination of Hackney Wick, Temple Mills and Eastway; and Becton Gasworks was the third option. So we had developed those two alternative options.

Lord Moynihan: Did you do an initial financial feasibility of the two and make a comparison? Were you driven by keeping costs lower on one rather than the other? You will recall that at that time we were talking about a budget for the Games of about £2.3 billion and it ended up over £9 billion. Were you, in the BOA, really driven by arguing the case that the lower the cost, the greater the chance of persuading politicians of success?

David Luckes: It was a two-stage process. There was not too much else in terms of resource to put into this, and I certainly did not have the background to be able to do a 6 financial analysis of all these sites. The bit of work that I did was very much from a planning perspective: is the site more than 50 hectares, does it have any particular planning constraints or issues—so is it greenbelt land? This is what the London Planning Advisory

Committee did for us. It was followed, if Members remember, with a cost-benefit analysis by Arup in 2001, and that was on the back of the work that we did at the BOA, which culminated in December 2000 with that initial feasibility study or overview—whatever you want to call it.

As to the decision in terms of whether to move for an East London-based Games or a West

London-based Games, at the BOA we were very agnostic over which was better. Whilst you had Wembley, Dorney, which was being built at that particular point and still had not been finished, and you had other venues such as Wimbledon, Lords and Wembley Arena. In the East, you had the potential development, which has now come to fruition, of the full

ExCeL indoor hall space, which was exceptionally attractive. You had a lot of space available for a potential Olympic Park in and around the Stratford area, which is what came to pass.

We presented to the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport in February 2001 and followed it up with a presentation to the Mayor in March 2001 and, in fairness, the Mayor was not particularly interested in hearing the detail of the presentation. He just said, “I will support this if it is an East London-based Games”.

Q111 Baroness King of Bow: I am glad to hear that the Mayor was not as agnostic as the

BOA. Living in the shadow of the stadium, which obviously has been transformative, my blood runs cold even hearing the prospect that it might have been Northolt or Southall.

Leaving that to one side, I wonder if you could tell us about the notion of “legacy” in

London’s bid. We hear that London won because the bid for London was a bid for the world, it was a very inclusive bid, and it had a fabulous amount of work around legacy. How important was that legacy in winning the bid or was it just one of many important factors? 7

David Luckes: I think it was one of many. Legacy itself does not necessarily convince people to vote for you internationally. It has a strong domestic sell and it was a strong, I suppose, pitch, for want of a better phrase, domestically, to say, “This is something that will have tangible benefits for people on the ground in East London”. Sometimes that pitch is oversold internationally, because if you have people from Malaysia or Botswana, the legacy value of regenerating East London is probably less to them. That was part of the story. Part of it was, I suppose, the international inspiration element of it, but it had to be coupled with technical competency. Going back to the Wembley story, there was the fact that we had had to hand back the 2005 World Championships in Athletics, which for the United

Kingdom was probably an embarrassment, in many ways, in international circles. There was a lot of damage that had been done through that, and it was important that we showed credibility in terms of a bid that was not just visionary but also had roots in practicality and deliverability.

Baroness King of Bow: Were we less able to do that than Athens, say?

David Luckes: Athens got voted in 1997, so it was probably a different world and there was also a strength of feeling that Athens may have been dealt a harsh card in 1996 when it was overlooked for Atlanta. So there was certainly an element of sympathy for Athens in terms of putting on the Games.

The reason why different bid cities choose to bid and choose to host is probably the most critical thing about looking to stage a major event. For some people it is not just about economics or making a profit or regeneration. Atlanta used its Games very much to boost itself as being the place to relocate businesses in the US, and it was successful in how it did that. It was a completely different thing from Barcelona, which was regeneration and tourism; Sydney, which was very much international exposure and tourism; and Beijing, 8 which was, I suppose, probably making a more political statement about them being one of the major capitals in the world.

Q112 Lord Moynihan: Can I just pick up on one point you made about legacy not being critical internationally and being much more important domestically? Do you think that is a tenable position moving forward for the international federations and the International

Olympic Committee? You are in a unique position: you were involved in the build-up of the bid, you were key to the Games and are now working with an international federation. The

IOC Games Department is very much at the heart of what the IOC is today, and the importance of legacy is argued by some as not being particularly critical to IOC members or, indeed, the Games Department. What matters is a successful Games. With the international federations, they also are there to make sure that the Olympic Games is highly successful for their sport. They are competing to keep their sports on the agenda at future

Games. Should legacy be a far higher priority for the IFs and the IOC in determining their approach to hosting an Olympic Games?

David Luckes: I think it absolutely should. The world has moved on in terms of how major events are viewed, and in many ways there is a danger, certainly with events such as the

Olympic Games, of them becoming so big that only a handful of cities can ever host and stage them. This goes against the ethos of what the Olympic Movement is all about, so there has to be a more sustainable approach to delivering the Games. Speaking now as an international federation and having been in the job only five months—a year ago I was on the other side of the fence dealing with international federations and national Olympic

Committees as well—the important thing is to try to keep the demands to a manageable level. It is understood that the Olympic Games are the pinnacle of an athlete’s career. It is the greatest sporting event in the world bar none, but it still needs to be set in the context 9 of the society that we live in and, therefore, some of the inflationary aspects of the Olympic

Games always need some checks and balances as well.

Certainly the international federation I now work with, which is the International Hockey

Federation, takes an approach that is legacy-driven. We work with Brazil in developing pitches not just for the Games but taking those pitches from an area of Rio—they do not need four pitches in one area—and then building new pitches around Brazil, and we are working with them to develop the sport longer term in the country. It is very important that federations do that, and that not just federations but other people within the Olympic

Movement have an eye to that. From some of the photos that have come out of Athens in the years following, where you have venues that are not being used, that are overgrown with weeds, and a brand new canoe slalom course that people cannot afford to run, it is very important that those things are factored in. I think that we in London took a lot of those lessons on board and tried to come up with an appropriate legacy story that delivered excellent facilities at Games time, but we also tried to come up with a legacy proposal as well that was proportionate and appropriate to the future needs of the city and the country.

Lord Wigley: We have tended to talk of legacy on this Committee in terms of the legacy for London and for the UK. Should we be thinking in terms also of legacy in a more international context—legacy for other people?

David Luckes: “Legacy” is an interesting word that probably gets used a lot without necessarily people defining what it is. When most people talk about “legacy” in the pub, in the restaurant or wherever, they mean the physical, hard buildings that are left following an event. “Legacy” can be also through the 70,000 volunteers we had during London and their experience and keeping those people volunteering not even just within sport but within any walk of life. We now have an army of people in event management who are highly skilled and highly trained, and a lot of them are now delivering Glasgow for the 10

Commonwealth Games and are involved with the 2015 Rugby World Cup as well, so legacy comes in different forms. If we can try to find a way to make it more international, I think that would be a great step forward, but it is probably quite a hard one to determine. It probably sits a little bit outside the remit of the organising committee, and therefore it may be for others to develop.

Q113 Lord Stoneham of Droxford: I have a three-part question. You have touched on this, but could you summarise what you envisage the legacy of the 2012 Games will be? Did your assessment of that change between 2005 and the beginning of the Games? Has it changed since the Games?

David Luckes: I think it is still too early to determine what the legacy of 2012 will be. The

Games was a great opportunity and provided a great potential to be built upon, but I do not think you can judge the legacy of the Games until probably 10 years down the line, whether it be from a regeneration of East London standpoint, about increasing participation levels, about a boost to elite-level sport, more people volunteering or a healthier society, and then it is important to link the Olympic factor and Olympic values back through that. As I say, it is probably a little bit early to judge.

Lord Stoneham of Droxford: Are you able to say how your own view of it changed in the preparation for the Games, and then from the impact of the Games and subsequently?

Do you think your assessment of what the legacy might be has changed?

David Luckes: Yes, initially we were probably very focused on technical competency, making sure that we delivered what we said we would deliver, and that we were good partners to the people who we were working with. The Games themselves, once they took place, probably surprised everyone in terms of the enthusiasm of the people who came and watched and also the people who sat at home and watched. The media also were quite enthused by it as well. All of those things I think shifted through the Olympics and then 11 probably, I would say more importantly or as importantly, through the Paralympics, where the atmosphere levels seemed to reach a new height, because a lot of people who had previously not been able to get Olympics tickets were able to get Paralympics tickets and experience the same venues with top-class competition. So I think there is an Olympic legacy; there is also a legacy for disability sport as well, which is probably going to be a big shift. It is a difficult one for the Paralympic Movement going forward with Rio, where there will be a dip in terms of the support that it will get locally. I think there will be a dip, in some ways, from an Olympic perspective as well, just because there are probably five or six sports that Brazil is strong at, and the challenge for the organisers in Rio is to try to sell the other 22 sports to people. In the UK, there is a strong tradition of watching any sport and very much enjoying the drama and excitement of sport in general. In Brazil, there is not that culture, and that is something I know the Rio 2016 people are looking at: how they develop their ticketing strategy to try to get those full stadia that we had in London.

Lord Stoneham of Droxford: Is there anything about the legacy that emerged that has surprised you or is new as a result of the experience of having the Games?

David Luckes: Just to touch on one area, I did read a quote from Barry Hearne the other day, who said that the Copper Box would be the best boxing venue in Europe. Probably until 2010 and maybe even early 2011, the Copper Box was not due to be retained as a facility. There were discussions, and certainly people within both the ODA and LOCOG were looking to try to have that as a temporary venue or even part of the International

Broadcast Centre, but there was a move to keep the Copper Box precisely because you have the O2, you have ExCeL, even Wembley Arena and Earls Court, which are hugely expensive for national governing bodies to rent out. Having a smaller, flexible facility for the

14 indoor sports in the Games and also other sports and other community-based events as an affordable venue in that part of London, tied in with the Stadium and the Velodrome and 12 the Aquatics Centre, as a legacy was also something that shifted very late in the piece.

Investment in sporting facilities is crucial, and I think that will be probably one of the best investments that have been made.

Q114 Lord Moynihan: I am going to ask you a very brief question on a different subject.

I would like to pick up and really push you on one point you have made, and that is the argument that you really cannot judge legacy for 10 years. Is that really a tenable position?

Take, for example, the success of the Team. That led to an immediate decision that high performance sport in this country would be supported at a different level of financial support moving forward. Take participation, we had evidence from British Cycling yesterday about the immediate benefit in terms of participation and cycling events—a direct spinoff from the

Games by a well organised governing body. It surely is not a tenable position to say we cannot judge the Games until we have had another two Games to focus our attention on,

Rio and potentially one of the three candidate cities at the moment. Can I push you on that?

Baroness King of Bow: Can I just add to that? Is it not a bit like that oft-quoted response attributed to Chairman Mao when he was asked what he thought of the French Revolution,

“It is too early to say”.

The Chairman: It was Zhou Enlai.

Baroness King of Bow: Do you know, someone told me I had it wrong the other day?

That is why I said “attributed to”. Is it not about measuring legacy at different stages, and there is a stage here, one year on, where we can measure it? Certainly in East London we can measure some of the legacy, whether it is in terms of housing, when the housing was coming on stream, or when the Olympic Stadium is going to be open for use again in a couple of months, et cetera. Is it not about the stages at which you measure legacy, rather than saying that you cannot measure legacy so soon? 13

David Luckes: I would probably clarify my point to say that you do not get the full picture of the legacy until 10 years down the line. In elite sport it is probably very different. In terms of the area of East London and the regeneration of East London, was that the right, appropriate legacy and successful? I do not think you can judge that after 12 months and when the Olympic Park is not yet open. So I think that is right; it is a staged thing depending on which area.

I am now based in Switzerland, so I only watch this from afar, but I know that participation numbers certainly within my sport in the UK amongst under-16s, which are not covered by the study from Sport England, are up by 8,000. They do not hit that national study until they are over 16, so there is a lot of participation now happening amongst the six-, seven-, eight-, nine- and 10-year-olds who attended the Games that probably cannot be measured for another six or seven years when they become 16 and get on to some of the official censuses on this. So I think it is right, but in terms of the overall picture, then maybe it is a bit longer.

Lord Moynihan: Thank you for clarifying that. Just a very brief question going back to your vision when you working on the bid at the early stage. Is the Olympic Stadium, as it has turned out, consistent with your view and the view of the BOA at the time you put the bid together?

David Luckes: Yes. It was always important to have an anchor tenant, and everyone understood that you do have to have an anchor tenant for a facility of that size. When the bid was initially constructed, as mentioned previously, we had had the World Championships in Athletics for 2005 that were then handed back to the IAAF and then handed on to

Helsinki. The fact that those Games took place just after we won in Singapore I think brought home the reality of the meagreness in some areas in London of the facilities that we had. In terms of aquatics, there was not a proper 50-metre pool. Crystal Palace had various issues in terms of its length for a number of years, which was just outside the tolerance once 14 you put the timing pads on, so you could not do major international events there. We did not have a 50-metre pool in the whole of London; there were more on the Gold Coast in

Australia than there were in the whole of the UK. So there were bits of that that were important to address long term.

The Olympic Stadium was always predicated on having an athletics track that would remain as an athletics track, as a multi-purpose facility, and it was always felt that there would need to be an element of investment into that alongside the anchor tenant as well. This is a personal view rather than a BOA view. I feel that we need to invest in sporting facilities as much as we do in cultural and heritage facilities; they are important parts of the component of culture and social life. I think that what has happened now with West Ham and an athletics facility is broadly consistent with the approach that was taken.

Q115 Lord Wigley: In the intervention I made earlier, you tended to look at legacy in terms of the physical legacy around the location, so how did the design of the legacy plan seek to deliver benefits to the whole of the United Kingdom in addition to those of the host area of East London?

David Luckes: This was an area that was not specifically under my brief, but certainly during the bid there was a Nations and Regions Group, chaired by Charles Allen, designed really to maximise benefits. From a sporting point of view, and I was overseeing the putting together of the sporting competition, we had the option of moving the football tournament within

London, because we had enough football venues within London to stage the six venues we needed within the boundaries of Greater London. But we took a conscious decision to keep

Glasgow, Newcastle, Cardiff, Manchester and, at that time, Birmingham, but Villa Park withdrew and we replaced it with Coventry, as a means of giving as many people as possible the opportunity of attending an Olympic event, and also the sailing at Weymouth and

Portland. 15

Lord Wigley: So you attempted to look at it in terms of the activities themselves, but the overwhelming majority of the activities themselves were in the London area, were they not?

Some might argue that some of those activities—perhaps mountain biking or something like that—could have been in a mountain area, rather than in Essex.

David Luckes: Yes. There is always a view that the wider you can spread the benefits, the better, but we also have to be cognisant of the contract that we have signed with the

International Olympic Committee and the international federations, which is predicated very much on athletes staying in the Olympic Village and having a single city for those Games. In the future, who knows where that may go, but certainly under the rules that we were operating to, that is what we came up with.

The area that we did work hard on was delivering all the sports equipment back to the national governing bodies, which are based all over the country. Whether it be sand from the beach volleyball being going to Manchester or Leeds, we had 1,000 items of sports equipment that went back to the national governing bodies, which was also a viable legacy.

We also had the skilled workforce that we developed, which, as I said earlier, is now, for example, with Glasgow, rugby and many of the other event organisations that are looking to run events across the UK.

Lord Wigley: Perhaps finally I could just link back to the broader legacy that I touched upon, the international legacy. I noted what you said—and of course I accept what you say— but would you not accept, at least in terms of the Paralympic side, that there must be an international legacy and impact from these London Games because the inspiration and what happened most assuredly would not have stayed within national boundaries?

David Luckes: I hope the answer is yes. One of the key areas that the International

Paralympic Committee needs to address, and also one that probably American society needs to address, is getting more television coverage on NBC. They had very, very limited 16 exposure to the Paralympic Games compared with what we had. I do not know exactly what the figures were, but they were in tens rather than the hundreds that we had here in terms of hours shown of the Paralympics. It probably was not even much more than 20 or

25 hours of Paralympics shown in the United States. We need to get some of the bigger players in world sport buying into the whole Paralympic Movement and helping support, sustain and grow the Paralympic Movement.

Lord Wigley: If they did, would that be part of the legacy?

David Luckes: I think that would be a fantastic legacy, yes.

Q116 Baroness Wheatcroft: I would just like to ask you, if I may, about the equestrian events, because you stressed that you think investment in sporting facilities is as important as the investment in culture and heritage. The equestrian events were, by any standard, hugely successful, but what is the Olympic legacy there? The investment that was put into the sporting facilities in Greenwich was dismantled immediately afterwards.

David Luckes: Probably as early as 1998/1999 we had discussions with the British Equestrian

Foundation over what the legacy could and should be, and we looked at all options, from

Windsor Great Park to taking it to Badminton, or the use of Hickstead. There were two things that changed everything: first, the British Equestrian Federation did not feel that there was a need for any major national facility. Even with Badminton, Blenheim and Burleigh, it has an existing field of play, but all the overlay that comes in is all temporary infrastructure.

From the equestrians’ point of view, they had a problem in the Beijing Olympics, where they ended up in Hong Kong and, therefore, they were a three-and-a-half hour flight away from where all the other sports were happening. There was a major concern within the

International Equestrian Federation that, because of the cost and complexity of the sport, and also because there was a view that the sport only appealed to certain sections of society 17 in certain regions of the world, it could be under threat as a sport moving forward for future

Games if it was not seen to be at the heart of the Olympic Movement.

So, from an equestrian point of view, Greenwich worked fantastically well in delivering an event that showcased the sport to a whole new population. Even during the test event many of the Greenwich schools came en masse, that being their first exposure to equestrian sport.

At the same time, the British Equestrian Federation opened up a new facility in Greenwich, which is a viable legacy that is now running. it had a scheme called Hoof, which was very much about getting new young people involved in the sport. It was based around the work that was being done through the Olympics and, from a British Equestrian Federation point of view, that was a good, appropriate legacy for it. From the International Equestrian

Federation’s point of view, it remaining as part of the Olympic Movement was the best legacy that it could get.

Baroness Wheatcroft: You would be very hard pressed to find anywhere in the UK that took three-and-a-half hours to get to by air. However, if, a year on, we look at the legacy in

Greenwich and those schools, are you confident there is a lasting legacy?

David Luckes: I have not been to those schools in Greenwich in the past few months, so I would not like to comment on how much the work that was done is still now bearing fruit and paying dividends. I apologise, Lord Chairman, I probably cannot answer that.

The Chairman: I think we may seek some evidence from Greenwich specifically on that. I have heard things are going on, but it would be useful to know more.

Q117 Lord Moynihan: Is it not the case that when you were formulating the bid you were absolutely conscious of the fact that the IOC was going to place a very high priority when it came to the vote on how many sports could be serviced from athletes living within the Olympic Village and that those are the rules at the moment? So, irrespective of the benefits of Bisley or going to Windsor Great Park or mountain biking in Wales, the reality is 18 that at the moment, under current rules, the IOC places a very high priority on an inclusive, multi-sport Olympic Village rather than a second world championship, which, for the rowers or the sailors, is what it is every year, because they are in a village distinct from the Olympic

Village itself. Is that not the case, and was it a key factor in determining the venues in your mind? Secondly, do you not think that is an issue that should be looked at again, over time, by the IOC and by the IFs, so that the concept of sports legacy and urban regeneration legacy should be given a higher priority in determining the successful cities?

David Luckes: I agree. As mentioned earlier, the reason there was a West London and an

East London bid was precisely so that athletes could stay in the Olympic Village; it was felt that with a city the size of London, it would be difficult to transport people to all different venues in all different parts of London, and hence the reason for splitting it.

It was also critical, having come off the back of three failed bids from the United Kingdom, that we listened to what the rules of the process were—and they were: it is one city; you need to keep this as compact as possible; you need to use as many existing facilities as possible; and do not build facilities that will be white elephants. So you had what I would say was an appropriate legacy, factoring in that initially we had 28 sports, which then dropped to

26. Therefore, you cannot just build everything for everyone. You have to come up with creative solutions, but those creative solutions were predicated on a single Olympic Village unless, as you rightly point out, they are sailing and football. You do not often get a

2,500 metre stretch of rowing lake in the middle of a city, so sometimes you have to go outside for that.

The Chairman: What about whether the IOC should consider changing that rule and whether that would be of benefit to international federations?

David Luckes: At the moment, the IOC is very clear that the number of athletes should not exceed 10,500. Even with 10,500 and another 5,500 officials, it makes it quite a strenuous 19 set of demands on any city. That is why, certainly with London, you saw the size and the scale of those cities, and there is the global nature of those cities coming forward for 2020, with Istanbul, Madrid and Tokyo—again, some major, large, global cities that are coming in. I think there is a case for looking at broadening the reach of the Olympic Movement and trying certainly, maybe through the inclusion of some new disciplines, to disperse some of those new disciplines or some of the existing disciplines to other parts of the country. But it is important to note that you can only bid and deliver under the rules of the people who set the rules, and that is what we did in London.

Q118 Baroness Billingham: You have given us a very clear analysis of a number of aspects of the legacy, and it is absolutely certain that, however clear and however good the pre-planning is, sometimes things go wrong. We all witnessed that on the Centre Court at

Wimbledon yesterday. Nobody would have put much money on that—I understand that

Switzerland is now definitely in mourning, so be careful when you go back. Have a think about this one: is there likely to be a long-term legacy of increased public participation in sport following London 2012, and will the Games themselves, as well as the Government’s

10-point plan, the sports legacy plan, deliver the increases in participation that have, so far, not been delivered within the previous Olympic host nations? Why do you think those failures could occur?

David Luckes: I will take the last point first. It has been a problem for previous host countries to keep the funding not just for the elite-level but also in terms of grassroots funding. I do not know the exact reasons why that is. It is probably a combination of factors, which is a collective hangover from the Olympic Games coupled with people from other organisations pushing for money from the same pot.

From the Olympic Games participation standpoint, and again I am only basing this on information that I have read myself as opposed to researched myself, I saw that there was a 20 drop in 200,000 people participating through the Sport England study. But that also showed that there was a clear spike in the October figure, which went up to 15.5, through a combination of factors. It could well be the fact that we have had a very long and hard winter, and people are less likely to go out and play sport when the weather is very inclement and we do not necessarily have enough indoor facilities for people to go and play and train in. I was also taken by some of the sports that had fallen away, which were golf, rugby, football and cricket—some of the more traditionally based team sports.

There is a view that how people play sport is changing. I apologise for going back to my own sport, but I know that within the England Hockey setup they have introduced a new format called “Rush Hockey” where people who do not want to pay an annual subscription to a club and do not want to have to try to get into the sixth team of a club and work their way through can sign up in a similar way to five-a-side football. They sign up to play on a

Saturday and they all turn up with a simplified form of the rules—people of all levels and all abilities. You have 22 people who play a game of hockey and then all go home afterwards.

Those people are not captured in a lot of the data that come out, but the way people are choosing to do sport now means that the sports must adapt to those people as opposed to what was traditionally the other way around.

So I think there is that bright future, coupled with the under-16 youth participation rates that also seem to be increasing, which makes us very positive about what will happen in the future, but it has to be backed up by having the facilities for those people and also good coaching as and when they want to get better and progress.

Baroness Billingham: I am really glad that you raised the issue about team sports, being a hockey player yourself. We had a very good presentation yesterday. The gentleman talked about volleyball, and the fact that it is so expensive for team sports to get sufficient money.

It is incredibly expensive and they are, I think, disadvantaged. He certainly felt that volleyball 21 has been thrown to the wolves, if you can use the analogy, and I had great sympathy with that. So do you think there should be special areas of support? I know I am going off this question, but maybe, as part of the legacy, team games ought to be given different criteria.

David Luckes: I would agree with that. Looking at how elite sport is often measured, you see that that is where you have demonstrable performance indicators. In basketball or volleyball, at the Olympic Games the players can only win gold, silver and bronze in men’s and women’s, whereas boxing has 45 medals, taekwondo has 32 medals, and weightlifting has

45 medals. Certain countries tend to target sports with the weight categories, where by being good at one sport you can be in the mix for a number of medals. There is a view that because team sport is more representative of the nation, people will support a hockey team or a basketball team or a volleyball team as representing them as it has the tag “Great

Britain”; it is not an individual. I do think they have a certain cachet and a certain need for them to be treated slightly differently. I would then extrapolate that all the way down to grassroots level as well.

The Chairman: A very interesting point.

Q119 Earl of Arran: You have already alluded to this point quite a few times, but from the point of view of the success of the bid process, what lessons do you think there are to be learnt for those wishing to bring great sporting events to this country?

David Luckes: I think it is really important, first, to understand why you want to bid.

Touching on the previous comments, it may be for different reasons: it may be for prestige, for economic reasons, for business reasons or for political reasons, but it is really important to be clear and up front in terms of why people are choosing to seek to host an event.

Secondly, it is really important to understand the rules and the requirements of that bid. It is a bit like reading the question in an exam before you answer it. You should not assume 22 you know what the question is going to be. You need to read it thoroughly, take the time to answer the question and make sure you are not answering a different one.

There is also the need domestically to ensure that all the stakeholders are on board.

Certainly, getting cross-party support for a London Olympic bid was absolutely critical.

There is a need for investment in quality staff and leaders: people who will take, I suppose, the technical concept and overlay it with the vision, but also people who can inspire the workforce and other people to support whichever bid you are running for.

Finally, I think it is really important to show the people with whom you work that you are good partners. If you are to win a bid, people need to trust you, like you, respect you and believe that you will deliver against the promises that you make.

Earl of Arran: What salient points do you think the Rio officials took back from London to make their Games better?

David Luckes: I know they were a little bit nervous, having watched us, in terms of how they can deliver, but we were as nervous coming out of Beijing, and a lot of people were saying that there was no way that we would ever match what Beijing did. The crucial thing is not necessarily to mimic it but to take the core components of what the success was about and then to put it in your own cultural context. So Rio will do it differently. They will do it to probably a slightly different timeframe from us, but the opening ceremony date is set and I have no doubt that they will put on a very, very good Games.

Earl of Arran: The mañana Games.

Baroness King of Bow: Just out of interest on that point of how we won the bid, there is a lot of mythology around this idea that on the night of the vote the French President could not be bothered, and there was Tony Blair pressing everyone’s hand, whether they wanted it or not. How much truth is there in that, or was that not a factor? 23

David Luckes: No, I think that political support was a major factor, and when you have the

Prime Minister of any country who takes the time to turn up and individually meet every single person who is going to vote, that has an impact. People can speculate as to how many people it sways and how many people change their vote on the back of that, but the fact is that you had someone prepared to do that two days before hosting. I do not know whether it was G8 summit around the time, but that certainly showed that we were serious, and that was the most important thing. It showed the credibility and the seriousness of the bid, and then what other people choose to do from other cities is set in that context.

The Chairman: Thank you very much indeed. That concludes our evidence session. We will be meeting again next Wednesday morning, when we will be hearing from Sport

England, the English Federation of Disability Sport and Baroness Grey-Thompson. Thank you very much.