Daphne Dimopoulos the 2012 Olympics Editor of the London Daily News visited the the construction site of the 2012 games, an  Athenian now in London  gives her take on how the construction is progressing.

The Olympic Delivery Authority invited today a group of journalists for the last viewing of the Olympic Park before the Beijing Games next month.

Three years since London was handed the 2012 Olympiad in Singapore, the city has completed the three sevenths of its journey to 2012 said Paul Deighton, chief executive of the London Organising Committee of the Games and “we remain very much on track” said David Higgins, chief executive of the Olympic Delivery Authority.

With 3,000 workers on site - a number set to continuously increase, working from 6am to 7pm on a daily basis, the Olympic Park is bound to deliver its bid promise of being “a project like no other”.

The Olympic Park, which is the biggest construction work in the country in the last 200 years, is designed to host 80,000 people. And although a lot of sports are set to take place outside the Olympic Park in already existing venues such as Wimbledon, Greenwich, Earl’s Court and Hyde Park, the Olympic Park keeps on as the main Olympic Games attraction.

The Park will include the Olympic Village - which at the moment is completely flat, the Olympic Stadium, the media broadcasting centre -a massive building set to accommodate 20,000 journalists, an aquatic centre – the biggest one in Europe consisting of a 50 metre pool, an enormous shopping centre and many other sport facilities including two hockey pitches, a handball arena and a basketball field.

Today the Olympic Park is still a massive tract of land filled with cranes and piles of soil. At the moment focus has been placed on de-contamination, soil washing and recycling. The reason for this is that the Committee aims at “cleaning up” and “repairing” the land, its waterways and its rough river-banks before starting to build the facilities.

To that end there are on site at the moment high-tech soil labs that monitor everything that is done and large soil washing machines throughout the whole Park.

Another mission that is currently under work on site is to pull off underground electricity. Long pathways are being wired with cables that will deliver electricity to the whole region of the site and beyond, without the need of electricity pylons. Now there is on site a large central power station which delivers “the best utilities supplies for the country” and which will remain as part of the development. But the site is also crammed with 52 voluminous electricity pylons all of which are planned to be removed by the end of the project to clear the place from their commanding presence.

The fragments of the river are also still visible throughout the Park. There is a number of noticeable spots where the water is running among the installations. The plan is to refine those spots and build bridges over the river banks which will craft smooth connections between the parts of the site that are separated by the water.

Another important undertaking will be a rail construction serving a 7 minute journey from Stratford to King’s Cross St. Pancreas during the Games.

All the works that are set to take place on the Olympic Park site are based on the objective not to build anything that is restricted to Olympic Games value and does not provide long-term use. “We don’t want to build something temporary and pull it down after the Games or even worse, build something permanent and not have an ongoing use of it” said Deighton.

“This project is an investment in the East End taken up to transform this part of London for the next 50 years” said Deighton.

“Our aim is not to build what we don’t need to build and to accept no compromise in quality” said Higgins. “We want to build around legacy capacity and not Games capacity” he said.

The Olympic Park is scheduled to open on the 27^th of July 2012 when it will host the Olympic Games opening ceremony.

“We are going to have an attractive urban park which will deliver fantastic Olympic Games but also will be a spectacular place to visit even after the Games” said Deighton.