This time the Games really are at risk

After the bridge collapse yesterday comes news this morning that part of the hall to be used for the weightlifting in Delhi has collapsed – the roof to be precise, or a section of it. This, along with talk that some of the supervisory teams scouting the Games Village have been finding faeces on the beds.

This looks extremely serious now. The Scots have already delayed flying. The Welsh announced this morning that they’ve given organisers a deadline tonight to assure them that the whole place is fit for their athletes. And western standards of hygiene do little or nothing to defend India’s interests in all this. Such comments would be better left unsaid.

 True, there could be a degree of over-caution. True, the west is perhaps over sensitive to “elf and safety” and all the rest of it. But when you put all the above against a background of violent attacks on westerners in India, in Mumbai and more recently – yes, in Delhi itself, you do have real questions to answer.

Yesterday a bridge collapse, injuring more than 20 site workers – several are critically hurt. A number of top-line medallists are not coming – though many — like the Queen – were not coming anyway. And under all of this the most expensive Commonwealth Games ever at £1.5 billion for India’s emerging economy.

Emergence is what it is all about. Delhi about to showcase just like South Africa did with the World Cup. But the ticket sales are awful. And – speaking of South Africa – piles of vuvuzelas and all manner of fan paraphernalia remain unsold. The Games, might, quite possibly, not happen at all.

Back to weightlifting: the Indian team has been hit by a doping scandal.

Pits dug for flowers which never came, filled up with monsoon rainfall and became breeding reservoirs for millions of mosquitoes bringing dengue fever with them. There have been graft scandals all over the construction site over cheaper material in fact but expensive ones in the invoice. And so it has gone on, and on, and on.

The great media game of cry-wolf has come full circle. Every World Cup, Olympic Games and Commonwealth Games is preceded by week upon week of negative stories: Athens won’t be ready; Sydney’s messed up on the legacy issues; Beijing will be too polluted or the yachting zones too full of algae and South Africa? Don’t even think about going with all those machinegun-toting robbers at every street corner…and so it all went on.

Hardly any of it actually came true of course. Almost all the problems were, in fact, wrapped up though sometimes only with days or even hours to spare.

It is certain that – with a couple of weeks to go – Delhi too really will solve continuing problems as they have been solved along the way.

But this time the wolf might just really be out there. Confidence is not so easily bolstered. Trust, once damaged, takes a long time to root again. These are the kind of issues really in play here. And they are there because what is going down on the site really is serious and of an altogether different order.

We are talking about large structures simply collapsing. This isn’t an algae problem in Beijing, a slight dearth of snow near Vancouver or concerns about crime rates in Cape Town. And for some athletes it is already too late – despite Indian officials stating that it’s all about western panic.