AS AN athlete, Sebastian Coe knew the importance of pacing yourself. Don’t shine too early, just cling close to the shoulder of the man in front, let him take all the expectation, then sprint past down the final straight. In sporting terms, London, with Lord Coe leading the bid, is still there on Paris’s heels as the race to host the 2012 Olympic Games comes to the last 26 days. Madrid is straining to find a final spurt, while New York and Moscow are hobbling far behind.

As the Games have grown, so it has become vital to house the athletes. The first Olympic Village was built for the Los Angeles Games in 1932, with 550 two-bedroom bungalows for the male athletes. Women did not get anything: they had to stay in hotels. The London Olympics in 1948 took place with much of the city still in ruins. It did not even receive a new stadium, and athletes were put up, still segregated by gender, in RAF camps, schools and nurses’ homes.

These days Olympic Villages take years to plan. But when the Games are over and the final drugs test administered, what happens to the Olympic Village? Will a London victory mean that Stratford becomes the place to live? According to mythology, the ancient Games were founded by Hercules, who had just finished the mucky labour of cleaning out the stables of a nearby king. Creating an Olympic site in the Lea Valley will be a similarly dirty task: the site of the proposed Olympic stadium and village is full of rundown residential areas and decaying industry. The Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS) calls it “one of the most deprived areas in Europe”.

The London bid’s philosophy seems to be “where there’s muck, there should be grass”. Some 1,500 acres of parkland will be created, the largest urban park to appear in Europe for 150 years. Water has a big role to play, too. As well as the rivers Lea and Thames, fountains and canals will spread throughout the park.

The Olympic Village, which will be a few minutes’ walk from the transport interchange at Stratford, is to be compact, so as not to encroach on the park. Following the tradition in much of London, the buildings for the 16,000 athletes will be clustered in blocks of up to 13 storeys around landscaped squares, with communal gardens and private balconies. The 3,600 apartments and townhouses will have between two and five bedrooms, and the plan is that half of these will be used as social housing and the rest sold on the private market. The administrative areas will be turned into community buildings, including three schools, while the athletes’ dining room will become a playing field.

The UK construction industry by and large backs the London bid, including firms that are not based in the capital that hope for spin-off benefits. Emma Jones, of Christian Action Housing Association, based in North London, said: “There is enthusiasm from developers and landlords we work with in the social housing sector.”

“Hopes are high in the private and public sector,” one RICS member said, but there are concerns as to whether the industry could cope with the demand for contractors and there is very slim public trust in the Government to deliver improvements in transport. The Crossrail project has, after all, been in the pipeline since the 1980s and is still stuck in the sidings.

In looking at the legacy of the Olympics, the bid team is hoping to copy the regeneration success that hosting the Commonwealth Games in 2002 had for Manchester. Jason Binns, of Henley Homes in London, said: “The benefits could be enormous if the right approach is taken. At the moment the site is somewhat remote and disengaged from the rest of London despite its proximity to Canary Wharf and the City of London. There is the opportunity to clean up a sizeable and fundamentally attractive location.”

He cautioned, however: “What must be avoided is burdening the local community with the costs of the new facilities.” Another RICS member, Alexander Moss, asked why we need the Games to regenerate a run-down area. “All (the improvements) could be done anyway and would not suffer from the diversion of resources created by the organisation and construction of stadia, villages and ancillary structures,” he said.

What if the bid doesn’t go to London? Could there be gains for the British property speculator if lots of new property is created in Madrid, Paris, New York or Moscow? Take Paris, which plans to create a new “Olympic quarter” in the Batignolles district, founded as a garden suburb by Napoleon III and now rather dilapidated. The Paris bid is promising to make this the greenest district in the city, virtually banning any cars, but Ian Springett, of the property website Primelocation, thinks that, like Stratford, it will be attractive only to impoverished locals. “I wouldn’t see a Paris win having any impact on the pied-à-terre market because the site isn’t in the location where British people want a Paris flat,” he says.

New York is too far away and its bid too riven by city squabbling, while Springett dismissed Moscow, the 66-1 outsider, out of hand. “In any case the Russians all want to come and live here rather than us moving there,” he says.

Which leaves Madrid as the only city that British property buyers should be backing if London does not win. “Simply because it is sunnier than the others,” Springett says. “That will always attract the Brits abroad and means that you can find people to rent a flat there.” He expects interest from British speculators if Madrid gets the nod, not least because the new apartments will be within just a ten-minute train journey of both Madrid city centre and the airport, rather than the 40 minutes it takes to get from Stratford to Stansted. Well, if it is good enough for David Beckham . . .

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