Remember the smog? Students of pre-Olympic catastrophes will recall the choking miasma that was going to kill the 2008 Beijing Games. The smoke over London will not be cleared by temporary factory closures and clean-air diktats.

Chinese state television has been poking fun. Maybe it was vengeance for the smog-apocalypse we predicted three years ago, or the algae-in-the-sea panic. Reeling Greece will be next to put the boot in. Athens builders, we sneered, would still be trying to get the first skip delivered when the 2004 Games commenced. Marathon runners would catch fire in the savage heat.

London's Olympics are a statement of Britain's deep love for sport, an excuse for regeneration in the capital's East End and a showcase for a brand of British smugness well-lampooned by TV's Twenty Twelve, in which the organisers emote about legacy, sustainability and "raising the bar" for the nation's children.

In the final episode, a silver medal-winning athlete delivers a series of crushingly inept motivational lectures in inner-city schools. The kids are suitably mystified and bored until our ambassador has his profile sharply downgraded by those responsible for what they might call the "core messages" of the London Games.

Another ambassador lost her role in the wake of week's riots. Chelsea Ives, 18, described as a talented athlete, was a "face of the Games" until her parents turned her in to the police. Ives was charged at Westminster Magistrates Court with burglary and violent disorder after allegedly looting a mobile phone shop and throwing bricks at a police car in disturbances in Enfield.

Ives had been to the House of Commons in her official role and met Seb Coe and Boris Johnson, London's mayor. If this potentially tragic tale tells us anything about the next summer's carnival it is that London needs to tone down the euphoric promotional expectations and start being real about the city in which Britain's biggest ever sporting event will be held.

Just as Beijing was meant to usher in the Chinese century so the London Games have bobbed along on a tide of rhetoric about diversity and inclusiveness. These claims are now shot to bits. London has been exposed to the world as a city in which a greedy and corrupt political and economic elite consign an underclass to urban dumping grounds and dismantle the welfare state built from the ruins of war when the Olympics last came to town, in 1948.

In France, the government advised its people to think seriously before travelling to Britain's cities. All across the world, people weighed the piety of a country who claimed to be first in slashing public spending to balance budgets against the chaos enveloping its streets.

No longer can the London Games present themselves as an advert for all the Blairite corporate gobbledegook that has littered the public sphere. To the legitimate threat of external terrorism has now been added the potential for internal immolation and destruction in a city that thought it could host the world in comfort and style. Even if London calms down between now and July it will feel different to those sold the Cool Britannia myth.

London's problem is that it "raised the bar" of its own aims unrealistically high to justify the enormous cost of the Games. Some days it seemed to be promising to cure obesity, turn every seven-year-old into a runner or jumper and leave behind a wonderland of top sporting facilities and transport links.

Some of this is still achievable. Coe, for one, is sincere in his desire to use the Games as a tool of social engineering, to improve and inspire.

But the truth shone out all along, especially when a £550m Olympic Stadium built partly with public money was handed over to the pornographers who own West Ham. A 17-day party will not alter the social conditions of Britain's cities, especially in a nation where credit card ticket-buying power rules.

Sport and exercise Sport and exercise are unquestionably life-improving endeavours, but a giant, highly commercialised TV extravaganza alone will not transform the most disadvantaged lives in Hackney and Tottenham. We should stop pretending it will. Many of us would have given up London 2012 in exchange for a huge investment in sport in state schools and deprived communities.

If Blairite Britain conceived the Olympic bid as a billboard for British modernity then the former prime minister's heir, David Cameron, is left to reassure Japanese or Californian visitors they will not have to brave a war zone next summer. By then, draconian prison sentences will have been imposed on many youngsters who made stupid first-time errors of judgment (and many who deserve a long spell inside) while unemployment and inequality continue their upward trajectories.

A paramilitary police force will have it all cleaned up by then, and the so-called underclass who the Games were meant to inspire will be demonised or incarcerated. In Atlanta, in 1996, anyone deemed unsightly was swept up and taken away.

Swansea's Brendan Rodgers will not be so romantic



On the page Manchester City v Swansea still looks like an FA Cup third-round tie. But the first Monday night fixture of the season is the most resonant of the Premier League's opening round, uniting a club capable of flicking £38m over the counter for Sergio Agüero with another who paid one squad member £1,300 a week in the Championship last term.

Swansea's rise from the basement to the top division in 10 years satisfies our need to see football, still, as a meritocracy. Brendan Rodgers, 38, their manager, promised in a weekend interview to blend "style and steel".

If the template for fearlessness was Blackpool then Ian Holloway's team also confirmed the need for lesser sides to build proper barricades to protect a lead and earn points against Champions League-calibre opposition.

Blackpool were inspirational in the first half of the season, but romance got the better of reality towards the end. Rodgers, a student of José Mourinho, will presumably not repeat that error.