Olympics: Sebastian Coe full of pride after helping to create "best Olympic village" yet Sebastian Coe was embraced by a total stranger last week - one small but meaningful sign that his vision of putting the athletes at the heart of the 2012 Olympics has been achieved. The person was an official of the Angolan women's basketball team who had just spent their first night in the athletes" village. "I had never met them before, but they came up and hugged me and said "for the first time we have got African food, proper African food." Those things matter to me," said Lord Coe, chairman of the London 2012 organising committee. We will have created the best environment for athletes, and I was really gratified to be talking last week to team officials and people whose judgement I really value saying this is the best Village we have been to. Those experiences have helped reinforce the feeling that the vision which Coe so memorably described to the International Olympic Committee in Singapore seven years ago has become a reality. "I joked at the beginning of this process that I did feel a bit like a Spanish timeshare salesman, saying "below that 50ft pile of rotting fridges is going to be the Olympic Stadium" and "you see that filthy river there? That's really going to have tiered banking and landscaped gardens and nice walkways. But that's what we are now seeing," said Coe. The most important thing about the vision we created was not just that it caught the imagination on that day in Singapore. It was important because we have delivered pretty much the spec we said we would deliver. Coe has enjoyed a remarkably smooth run since 2005 in terms of the preparations. Only in the final weeks have the Olympics run into a significant wall of bad publicity, caused mainly by security firm G4S suffering a meltdown by failing to provide the promised number of staff. The storm that blew up came as little surprise to Coe, who added: "I don't want to sound rather war-weary but it is what happens. I have seen it as a competitor and as a writer. Don't forget I was working in Australia for a newspaper and Channel Seven for two years on and off before the Sydney Games. I'm not cavalier about public attitude but I also know this is simply where you get to. Coe has been getting by on five hours of sleep a night and rising at 4.30 every morning, and so packed has been his timetable that he apologised for eating a quick lunch of pasta bolognese and salad during the interview. In recent weeks much of his time has been filled with public events, visits to the torch relay and on goodwill missions to the London 2012 workers. "The space I am in now is making people feel good about what they have done, and so they should because they have done a fantastic job," he said. So I spend my whole time walking around thanking people: volunteers, the army, the police, caterers and contractors - and, yes, thanking G4S who are out there - 4,000 of them, and whatever has been written they have not let the country down. They have done a superb job and I am talking specifically about the people who are out there in all weathers helping with our security effort.