London Calling

"Best opening ceremony of all time, I don't see how London 2012 can top that! Congratulations to the Chinese people!"
—WOLFGANG, from Switzerland, in an e-mail in the China Daily, Aug. 13

THE FURNITURE is low-slung chic and the lighting is whisper-soft at London House, a members-only club in Beijing's bustling Xicheng district that serves as a home-away-from-home for British officials, corporate partners and others in the orbit of the Games. Waitresses circle in the converted Shi Cha Hai Club, which fronts a lake a mile from the Forbidden City, offering small bowls of sublime if nontraditional versions of fish-and-chips and steak-and-kidney pie. (The English accents, however, are authentic.) When China opened the Olympics by presenting a cultural banquet that climaxed with former gymnast Li Ning circling the top of the Bird's Nest stadium to light the cauldron—Peter Pan meets Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon—the well-heeled Brits watching on projection screens in London House that night were awed. Everyone realized that the Olympic bar had been raised.

"I don't think one should be talking about topping [Beijing]," said Ashish Mishra, senior manager of emerging markets with the London Development Agency and a London House regular. "It's different stories. If you think of the Bond movies, each and every Bond movie got more and more spectacular. At every point you would have a new level of extravaganza, the latest level of technology. The bigger the scene the better. But what was the one that basically knocked everybody off his spots? Casino Royale. Why? Because it went back to basics."

London 2012: stirred, not shaken.

AS TORRENTS of rain fell on China's capital last Thursday afternoon—the only outdoor competition that could have been contested was ark sailing—Sebastian Coe, an architect of London's successful Olympic bid, sat in a hotel lobby with a group of journalists. The former middle-distance star now is Lord Coe and the chairman of the London Organising Committee of the Olympic Games (LOCOG), but in a polo shirt and cream-colored slacks, the 51-year-old remains disarmingly boyish. When asked what London (where it is rumored to rain on occasion) plans to do to control the weather—China shot 1,110 rockets containing silver iodide to fend off precipitation at the opening—he said, "We're currently constructing a roof that goes over the whole country."

The joke is more philosophical than meteorological. Not even China would have entertained the idea, although it is now hosting the Apocolympics, the end of the world of unfettered Olympic spending as we know it. Beijing says it spent more than $40 billion on Olympic-related infrastructure; there's no independent accounting. (In a description of the Bird's Nest available on the Games' internal computer system, the line for the cost of the structure has been left blank, a polite way of saying, "Mind your own damn business.") Setting forth in the direction of "sustainability," an IOC buzzword since early in the decade, LOCOG has a current budget of $17.3 billion.

"The days of leaving white elephants sitting in the middle of hard-pressed communities is over," Coe said. "The Olympic movement realizes that to remain relevant, the IOC has to [offer] a Games that goes on providing benefits long after the show has left town."

When the show returns to England for the first time in 64 years, London's Olympic Stadium in the hardscrabble East End will hold 80,000 people—Coe is hoping its turf will be trod by Great Britain's first Olympic soccer team since 1960—but will shed 55,000 temporary seats after the Games to serve a second-tier soccer team or a rugby club. There will be a new velodrome, a 17,500-seat aquatics center and a multisport complex that will be the site of team handball, but earth-moving will be modest by Beijing standards.

There will be another significant difference between London and Beijing that Wolfgang from Switzerland might grasp: the newspapers. Wolfgang's e-mail graced an inside page in China Daily, the English-language parish bulletin of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, which controls the media. Four years from now unstinting praise of London's opening ceremony might earn him tabloid headlines along the lines of WOLF EATS UP OUR GAMES!

Early last week the lively British press presented an actual soap opera—the head of the Australian Olympic Committee had joked, "Not bad for a country that has no swimming pools and very little soap," after Great Britain's Rebecca Adlington and Joanne Jackson finished one-three in the 400-meter freestyle—but the quintessential Fleet Street tale involved 14-year-old diving prodigy Tom Daley and his 26-year-old partner in the synchronized event, Blake Aldridge. They had a spat during the competition, Daley snapping because Aldridge spoke on the phone to his mother at poolside. "It was just Thomas being overnervous," Aldridge said of the row.