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London 2012: Black Locals Feel Forgotten

The Root Exclusive: In the shadow of Olympic Park, neighborhood residents talk broken promises.

By Anita Powell, theroot.com

Posted: 08/06/2012 01:51 PM EDT

Filed Under Global News, 2012 Summer Olympics, Sports News, 2012 London Olympics

Londoners await the Olympic Torch on Tottenham High Road. (Photo: Oli Scarff/Getty Images)

(The Root) — Michael Johnson came to Finsbury Park when he first moved to London from Jamaica 42 years ago. He remembers it as a place where he expended teenage energy — and most importantly, a venue where its athletics programs were free.

Over the decades, thousands of children like him have come and gone, many of them taking advantage of the complimentary sports offerings in Finsbury Park, which is located in the Borough of Haringey, an area considered one of the most deprived areas in all of Britain. More than half of its 250,000-plus residents are ethnic minorities.

But as the Olympics go on across town, Finsbury Park's run-down sports center faces shutdown. The local council says it can't pay for the center's upkeep and is considering handing it over to a consortium of sports clubs that may not offer round-the-clock access. That worries Johnson and his friends, a group of older men, most of them from immigrant families, who gather daily to do punishing circuit training on the track and in the bare-bones gym. In between circuits, they joke and catch up on life. "They should have done this place up for the Olympics," says Johnson, who is now 57. "We don't get a lot out of the games at all."

Haringey is just one of London's many diverse neighborhoods in which residents say they feel overshadowed by the Olympics, despite efforts from the London Organizing Committee for the Olympic Games (LOCOG), which is the first-ever Olympic group to have a Diversity and Inclusion Division. The committee was able to follow through on some of its intended goals, including the reclamation of former toxic wasteland in East London areas where Olympic sites were built, according to a Philadelphia Tribune report.

Still, in Hackney, one of London's most diverse neighborhoods, where some 100 different languages are spoken, residents have expressed anger about inconveniences caused by the preparation for event. For several years, some say, roadwork and construction had been done for the games. Now, with subsequent new parking restrictions, Shaba Dachi, 26, explains: "I can't even park my car on local streets. Some of the locals can't even come to church."

And then there's the matter of tickets. Not one of some two-dozen residents that The Root interviewed across London said they had venue tickets. Most said the prices were too high, but others said the Internet lottery process was confusing and flooded with applicants. "To not be able to get tickets is just a big frustration," he says. "I think there should have been some priority, some percentage of tickets made available to local residents."

Read the full story at theroot.com.

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