LONDON: As the host, Britain expected its Olympic athletes to do well. Sadly, based on their current performance, the British will struggle to match their Beijing 2008 achievement, when they came in fourth in the medals league.
But if there is no "host-nation bounce" on gold medals, could the British still strike gold by deriving broader economic benefits from organising the world's single biggest event? Unfortunately, that's equally unlikely, for London seems destined to join all previous Olympic host cities in discovering that staging the Games is not a money-making proposition.
What the Games can do, however, is to boost a nation's reputation, although that can't be counted in monetary terms.
For the moment, Prime Minister David Cameron still projects an immediate win for Britain of about 1 billion British pounds (US$1.55 billion) in extra trade deals from the Olympics, followed by a further 13 billion pounds over the next four years.
"Britain is back, open for business," he told a conference of 200 top global chief executive officers one day before the Games started.
And the offensive continues. Lancaster House, the central London palace nicknamed the "empire's graveyard" since it was there that most British colonies — including Singapore — concluded their independence treaties, now functions as a "British Business Embassy". It is a place where the roughly 4,000 international politicians and investors visiting the capital are being wined and dined in the hope of striking deals.
Cameron must know that his claims about the commercial benefits of the Olympics are exaggerated but he also knows that they will be difficult to disprove, since every investment decision taken in the next few years could be ascribed to the Games.
Yet on the streets of London, few share his optimism. Experian, a credit rating company, calculates that the number of shoppers in central London has fallen by an average of 12 per cent. Occupancy rates at London hotels are also down, partly because foreign visitor numbers are now averaging only about 100,000 a day — a third of the usual — but also because Game organisers, who had block-booked thousands of rooms for international Olympic delegates, have returned them unwanted. Hotels.com, the accommodation website, calculates that room rates have dropped by a quarter.
Attendance at London's theatres is sharply down.
"The last week in July is usually the busiest of the year, but this year it was the quietest," says the legendary Leicester Square Box Office's boss Dilip Ganeshan. And visitors to London's museums and galleries are down by more than a third.
None of this is surprising. A report by the European Tour Operators' Association on the Games' impact on previous host cities found that "the audiences regularly cited for such events as the Olympics are exaggerated. Attendances at the Games displace normal visitors and scare tourists away for some time.
There appears to be little evidence of any benefit to tourism of hosting an Olympic Games, and considerable evidence of damage".
Quite a number of host cities have managed to break even on the actual costs of mounting the Games: Atlanta famously achieved it in 1996, but so did London back in 1948, when it produced a profit of 29,000 pounds, a tidy sum at that time.
Yet not one of the modern Olympics has lived up to claims of boosting economic activity. The Australian government initially predicted that the 2000 Sydney Olympics would boost the national economy by 2 per cent; in fact, a study compiled in 2007 discovered that the Games actually dragged the economy down by about 0.3 per cent.
The Chinese government made no such predictions for the Beijing Games, partly because it was nobody's business to know, but also because China actively discouraged the presence of foreign tourists in an effort to avoid political mishaps. Yet all these examples pale into insignificance in comparison with the financial horrors of the Montreal Olympics in 1976: The Canadian city was saddled with debts which took three decades to repay, through a tobacco tax.
This is not to argue that holding the Games produces no public good.
The regeneration of Stratford, a rundown area of London where much of the city's industrial refuse used to be dumped, a "mountain of rotting fridges" as Sebastian Coe, head of the British organising committee memorably put it, clearly transforms the capital.
The fact that 7.4 billion pounds worth of Olympic contracts were awarded to British companies also helps. Still, it was prudent for the Office of Budget Responsibility, Britain's fiscal watchdog, to assume that the Olympics will have zero economic impact.
So, why do so many countries still dream of hosting the Games? Largely because of the huge potential to enhance or change national reputation and global standing.
The Tokyo Games in 1964 signified Japan's inclusion in the ranks of industrialised, wealthy nations; the same applied to Seoul in 1988, Barcelona in 1992 and, of course, Beijing in 2008.
As a city which is already the favourite European destination for entrepreneurs, students, investors and the idle super-rich, London did not need publicity as such.
Nevertheless, Britain needed to escape from its image as a set of remote, windswept islands, a nation hidebound in traditions and protocol, living in decaying castles and dreaming about its glorious past while its economy is in terminal decline.
And shaking off these stereotypes is precisely what the British sought from the Olympics. Which other nation would have chosen to bring to the opening ceremony hospital beds, complete with children and real nurses, in order to highlight a belief in universal health care?
And who would have chosen to emphasise juvenile fiction by having multiple Mary Poppins descending into the stadium?
The new James Bond girl has been chosen, and she's aged 86: It's none other than Britain's venerable Queen, who made history by becoming the first head to play an acting role in the Games. This was a master-stroke, an ingenious blend of Britain's most-known public brands.
While the message from the Beijing opening ceremony was "we're big, we're wealthy and the world should get used to it", the message from London was "we don't particularly care what you think, as long as you have another look".
This struck a chord; the most common word used by Chinese bloggers commenting on the London ceremony, for instance, was ren xing, for the heart-warming inclusiveness in having handicapped children and construction workers play a part in the opening ceremony.
And, since the Games have begun, the British have displayed their traditional ability to stick together when challenged.
There were no strikes, no massive immigration queues; the biggest story of the past week is that there was no story.
Was it all worth 9.3 billion pounds? On the face of it, no. But most of the investment will be recouped and, to paraphrase the advertisement of a credit card company, while almost everything has a price, there are some things in life — such as reputation and soft power — which remain priceless.
By arrangement with The Straits Times/ANN