Helping build Olympic dream (From The Northern Echo)

Helping build Olympic dream

10:00am Saturday 6th August 2011 in Backtrack By Mike Amos

The first big headlines of London 2012 are that the Olympic Stadium is finished, below budget and ahead of schedule.

Tony Aikenhead, the man who headed the team that made it possible, concedes in the first 30 seconds of our 90-minute chat that there are some who might be confounded. Maybe some who just remember Wembley.

"There is a feeling in this country that the British construction industry is unable to deliver major projects on time and within budget," he says. "I don't think that's the case.

"The odd one might not succeed within its parameters, but you never hear about the 99 per cent that succeed wholly."

Though he has no expectation of being among the 80,000 who will watch the lighting of the 17-day flame - "the Games are for athletics enthusiasts around the country, not oiks like me who built the stadium" - if ever a man carried an Olympic torch it is he.

That success has already seen him promoted to operations director of the huge Sir Robert McAlpine group. It's not bad for a man who left school in County Durham with one A-level and, he supposes, a not very good one at that.

The invitation to become the stadium's project director came in 2007, a telephone call from Benny Kelly, a friend and former colleague with whom he'd worked on the Millennium Dome. "He said he had a job for me, and I told him I already had one.

"He said no, a proper job. I didn't have to think very hard; it took me about 15 seconds to accept."

The stadium, surrounded by water on three sides, will be the showpiece of a £9bn Games build - "a sports Disneyland," the Telegraph called it. A year from now, 10,500 athletes and twice as many journalists will be in the capital. He believes both groups will like what they see.

"That's certainly pride in Team Stadium but it's not arrogance. You can't afford to be smug for a moment, you have to keep your feet on the ground because in this business someone will come along and bite you on the backside. You can't go around thinking you're something you're not."

Didn't it worry him that, at every stage of the operation, the world (and his no-less fickle wife) was looking over his shoulder, perhaps half-expecting the big top to fall in on the whole five-ring circus?

"It was a challenge to keep within budget and a challenge to our reputations, but it never for one moment entered my head that we had anything to prove to anyone or that it wouldn't be on time," he says. "I'm not answerable to the press."

Hugh Robertson, the sports minister, was clearly among the doubters. "I did not think in 2005," he admitted the other week, "that we had a chance of getting where we are today."

Tony Aikenhead was a policeman's son, born in Hartlepool in 1953. His dad, now 87, is still alive - "over the moon" - his mam died when he was 15.

They'd moved when he was just nine months old to Whickham, near Gateshead, then onto Chester-le-Street where he went to grammar school. When Tom Aikenhead became a chief superintendent in the Nigerian police at the time of the Biafran war, his son stayed with grandparents in Wingate and went as a sixth form boarder to Barnard Castle School - then boys only.

"I wasn't a typical public schoolboy at all, but I soon made a lot of very good friends, mainly because most of the school was from the North-East," he says.

He won colours at rugby and half-colours at cricket, joined the pupils' committee which persuaded the headmaster to relax uniform demands at weekends, affectionately remembers the dances with the local convent school.

"What convent school?"

"Polam Hall in Darlington."

"That's not a convent school."

"Wasn't it? They always said they were."

As a boy he'd wanted to be a pilot, at Barney he wanted to be a lawyer. Three B-grades would have got him into Newcastle University; he passed economics, failed maths and physics.

At the end of June, however, the boy who left with one uneconomical A-level - "I suppose that academically I was a disappointment to them, but more I was a disappointment to myself" - returned to Barnard Castle School to present prizes and give the address at speech day.

"It was very emotional," he says. "There were new buildings, it had gone co-educational but in many ways it hadn't changed at all. It was always a very good place to be."

Tony Aikenhead, however, was a man who learned on the job. He was a late developer.

London 2011 proves rather more subdued, rain seeping from a steel-shuttered sky, the Standard reporting that a £7m fabric "curtain" will cover part of the stadium exterior.

No 40 Bernard St, McAlpine's London offices opposite Russell Square underground, appears to be little more than a revolving door between a Tesco Express and a sandwich shop but, as they used to say on the buses, there's plenty more room upstairs.

It's palpably quite up there, a different construction altogether, the walls hung with photographs of completed tasks- the Shell Centre, the Solent Marina, Richmond Riverside. Proud but unwritten, the sub-text says "All our own work."

Tony Aikenhead proves both amiable and engaging, hands like a man who played second row rugby for West Hartlepool and feet that wouldn't fit ballet shoes, either.

"I should have done better at rugby, should have tried probably wasn't competitive enough," he says.

The club's website recalls him as a 6ft 3in ginger-top, a good player who didn't drink much. Save for a Darlington and Stockton Times piece about Barney speech day, there's surprisingly little else on the Internet.

"I try very hard to stay below the radar," he says. "I'm not used to giving interviews."

He has three children, one still at university, still gets to Twickenham whenever he can, swims and, with his wife, has just gained a yachting day skipper's ticket. There may not, he supposes, be a rush for tickets for the Olympic yachting, off Weymouth. "I think you can probably watch that from the cliffs."

For a big man he is quietly spoken, for a North-East man typically friendly. We talk of the 1971 Vulcan bomber crash near Wingate - "I was lying in bed at my grandma's"- of the Durham constabulary dog section, of his bachelor night at the Castle Eden Brewery club.

The comedian was Billy someone, talked about Thermos flasks. "He said they kept hot stuff hot and cold stuff cold, wondered how they knew which was which. It's funny how you remember these things."

After school he joined John Laing's as a trainee quantity surveyor. "My dad dissuaded me from the police force, I can't really remember why." Among his first jobs the rebuilding of Stockton High Street. "I must have measured every square metre of concrete of that hotel at the end," he recalls.

The high street has since been much criticised. "I honestly can't even remember it," he says.

Successive swift promotions led to his becoming Laing's operations director and an associate director of the plc. "I still hadn't really any letters after my name". After 27 years he joined a Swiss-based healthcare group with a global role, stayed for seven years, became a consultant.

"You could say I did very well as a consultant, a lot of work and a lot of money, but I was never very happy. I didn't really enjoy working on my own."

So was that why it took him just 15 seconds to agree to build the Olympic Stadium?

"Absolutely."

Soon he discovered that the site at Stratford, East London, had too many accidents -"three quite bad ones in September 08 alone." Safety became a crusade, among his greatest joys that when the flame is lit, they will be able to boast that for the first time in Olympic history, no one has been killed in stadium construction.

About 650 people would be working on the site at any time. "We had to change the culture," he says. "It became crucial to us that everyone went home safely at the end of the day. That was our priority I spent a lot of time on the site, mainly just talking to the guys.

"The stadium looks quite functional, but there's an enormous amount of engineering skill gone into it. The Olympic Delivery Authority have been a tremendous client, wholly collaborative, great people to work with.

"I'm delighted that it's worked out but never for a moment thought that it wouldn't."

He has to stay at work for a 6 30pm conference call, flies off to Germany next day, will oversee the Olympic Stadium until its flame finally dies. It will be for others to hand out the medals; for Tony Aikenhead it is simply a job, a proper job, well done.