London's Fog of Olympic Ambivalence LONDON - Finally, after all the talk and hoopla, it has dawned - 2012, the year of London's jubilant, triumphant, show-stopping hosting of the Olympic Games, and of Londoners" unbridled misery as the event unfolds through a fog of clogged subway cars, overbooked hotels and endless statistics about medals. Both visions of London's Olympic destiny are true, if unprovable, depending on which cab driver, barroom pundit, holder of tickets for the 100 meters final or failed bidder for those same prized items is expounding on the issue. If sporting spectaculars mirror the societies that stage them - the regimented opening ceremony of the 2008 Games in Beijing, for instance - then Britain's first Olympics since 1948 suggests ambivalence: for every muscle-toned, would-be champion, London offers a counterview, a curmudgeon voice to confound the organizers" attempts to create a myth of undiluted enthusiasm and public support. The Games, said Sebastian Coe, an Olympic gold medalist and the head of the organizing committee, will be "the biggest thing this nation will have delivered in the living memory of the vast majority of the population" - bigger, thus, than the Falklands war or the Northern Ireland peace, a supporting role in the invasion of Iraq, a lingering commitment in Afghanistan, the boom-to-bust banking crisis, the X-Factor or sundry royal weddings, funerals and divorces. Stretch the notion of living memory to encompass the witness that binds one generation's memory to the next, and a few weeks of sporting bonanza will eclipse the D-Day landings or the dismantling of most of the British Empire. But hype is part of the Olympic run-up, the boosterism discernible already in parts of the British media, cementing the new orthodoxy that holds support for the Games to be laudably British, and indifference to be a poor show, even unpatriotic. "We've got all the stuff in place," Lord Coe said, likening the Games to Halley's Comet "which doesn't come around that often" (every four years for the Games; 75 or so for the comet.) But people will decide how they respond, and my judgment is that they're responding in a massive way now. Massive, perhaps, in the sense described by Robert Hardman, a journalist and author, in The Daily Mail: "We have been treated like imbeciles by those who believe they have a divine right to squander other people's money in the name of sport." Or by the design critic Stephen Bayley, quoted in The Guardian on the subject of the opening ceremony, who suggested that "Sebastian Coe and his army of bureaucrats should be dressed in penitential costumes and chained together, then made to parade slowly around the stadium in muted lighting chanting "Mea culpa, mea culpa."" Great sporting galas, of course, always offer a contest between democracy and tyranny, between the crowds and competitors in the stadiums, bonded by the passion of the moment, and those less in thrall to balls kicked, javelins lofted, hurdles leaped, batons passed or shots put. To test the point, try navigating parts of West London when 82,000 rugby union fans are spilling out of Twickenham Stadium; or try crossing the city by road when highways are closed for the annual London Marathon. Now multiply those tribulations by many degrees and imagine a capital city in July and August committed to the Olympics to the exclusion of its normal crop of tourists, theatergoers or conventioneers. The West End theater district, said the composer and impresario Andrew Lloyd Webber, is facing "a bloodbath of a summer" because theatergoers can neither find nor afford hotel rooms in a city filled with sports fans. "People who want to go to the theater or concerts are not the same sort of people who really want to go to sport," he said. But duality has accompanied the London Games from their beginnings. For every announcement of stadiums built or rail links upgraded, there have been reports of cost overruns. London secured the right to host the Games at a time of economic boom when the nation seemed afloat on surging credit. Now, the city is obliged to stage them after the bust of the global economic crisis when jobs are lost and times are hard. "You can say: These are times of austerity, and therefore we should pare them down as much as possible," said Jeremy Hunt, the British culture secretary. Or, you can say: Because these are times of austerity, we need to do everything we possibly can to harness the opportunity of the Olympics. Britain has chosen the latter course. That is not really surprising: official enthusiasm has rarely seemed to wane or falter. On July 6, 2005, when the International Olympic Committee awarded the 2012 event to London, Prime Minister Tony Blair declared, "It's not often in this job that you punch the air and do a little dance and embrace the person next to you." Less than 24 hours later - by apparent coincidence - the hop-skip-and-jump fizzled when four homegrown suicide bombers killed 52 travelers next to them on the London transport network, confronting Britons with the unsettling notion that their land had spawned a nexus of Islamic terrorists bent on mayhem. The authorities spent successive years confronting waves of conspiracies, including the foiled plot in 2006 to bomb at least seven airliners over the Atlantic. That accomplishment by the security agencies, too, might have fallen within Mr. Coe's pantheon of achievement delivered in Britain's living memory. And it might help explain why, for all the exuberant anticipation, Britain plans to commit 13,000 troops in addition to the police to shield crowds and competitors, not just, presumably, from the curmudgeons, but also from those of far more sinister intent.