More legal wrangles threaten OS move

Yesterday it was Tessa Sanderson; today it's Leyton Orient supremo Barry Hearn who is threatening to destroy the Olympic Stadium bidding process.

Hearn, whose club are currently languishing in the lower half of League One has hit out at the process which he claims could signal the end of his 130-year-old club, whilst threatening to lobby for a judicial review.

"We're only 750 yards from the edge of the Olympic Park, while West Ham are four miles away and Tottenham seven miles round the North Circular - yet nobody has bothered to ask little old Leyton Orient for their views," he said. "Never mind that we're the second oldest Football League club in London, with a mere 130 years of history - we've become the lost tribe of East London, the elephant in the room nobody dares to mention.

"But we're not going to go away quietly. Leyton Orient may live in the shadow of two Premier League giants, but we've a right to be heard, especially when those giants could kill us off.

"I can't believe the legacy of London's 2012 Olympic bid was supposed to include one of the country's oldest clubs being railroaded out of existence. We may be a little club, but we're flag-bearers for our community, proud of our reputation as London's second favourite club and deserve to be heard.

"Nobody has come forward and said, 'This is how we are going to help Leyton Orient' once the Olympic circus has packed up its big top and the show has left town."

Just last week Hearn - who recently backed the Tottenham bid, having ruled out a move for Orient due to the post-games presence of the running track - called for the stadium to be demolished after the 2012 games.

"The only way forward for this stadium is to knock it down, take away the athletics track and build a proper stadium," he said. " They’ve messed up big time; there’s no room for an athletics track in this stadium, there is no demand for an athletics track with a 60,000 seater stadium, it’s a total white elephant."