Genius lone blogger proved right after nine years...

Bob E spotted this at the BBC:

The London Olympics is set to come in under its £9.3bn budget with £476m of the contingency funding left, according to new government figures.

Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt said it was "fantastic news" that the games would be on time and under budget. Ministers expect to be able to return the remaining money to the Treasury.

The £9.3bn budget, which included a £2bn contingency, was set in 2007 and was almost four times the estimated cost at the time London bid in 2005.

So it's not £476 million under budget, it's about £6.5 billion over budget, and how can they "return the remaining money" you can't give back what was never yours to begin with, but details, details. Just to remind myself what the original forecasts were, I did a Google search for pre-July 2005 results, and stumbled across this at www.liebreich.com, from early 2003:

The figure of £1.8 billion we were given by the bid committee for the direct costs of a London 2012 Olympic Games is patently nonsense. It was produced by Ove Arup, engineering consultants who won awards for their Sydney 2000 buildings. It excludes enormous items, such as the cost of accelerating infrastructure spending, the cost of security outside Olympic stadia, immigration, customs, social services and other local costs.

For a nightmare vision of what London 2012 might end up costing, look no further than Athens. The absolute minimum cost of Athens 2004 is £6.5 billion, all but £1.1 billion of which will be public money. Published estimates have ranged as high as £9.4 billion. In order to arrive at an accurate figure, add up the following...

So we could have just taken the Athens figure, knocked off half because our officials are not quite as corrupt as theirs and then doubled it again because everything in London is twice as expensive, and hey presto, there's your actual budget.