ALBERTPARK.

THE Olympics is terrifying me even more this week.

It's not so much the continuing furore over Tibet and how this is threatening to derail the event, but the continuing drip, drip, drip of information about how the London 2012 costs are escalating remorselessly.

The Olympic Delivery Agency sneaked out a couple of new estimates.

Seems just two of the smaller projects are now well over budget - the cycling Velodrome and the Aquatics Centre.

The cost for the Velodrome has free-wheeled up from the original estimate of pounds 28m to pounds 80m, while we are now going to splash out pounds 303m on the Aquatics Centre, which was originally costed at a mere pounds 75m.

Now that really is something to protest about.

What's so special about the torch, anyway, when the whole shebang owes more to Hitler than Homer - the ancient Greek, that is, not Simpson? The entire ritual, now hijacked by the Chinese, was devised by a German named Dr Carl Diem, who ran the controversial 1936 Olympics in Berlin. He dreamed up the ceremony, sold the concept to Josef Goebbels - the Fuhrer's PR man - who passed it on to his rather creepy film director floozie, Leni Riefenstahl. His idea was that 3,000 young, blonde athletes should carry burning torches from the Temple of Hera on Mount Olympus to the Berlin stadium.

The concept could hardly fail to appeal to the Nazis, who saw ancient Greece as a kind of Aryan forerunner of the Third Reich.

And what of the participants? The torch on its journey through central Europe was serenaded for part of the way by gipsy musicians who would later be rounded up and sent to death camps. Dr Diem ended up as a crazed Whermacht military commander who survived the war to die aged 80 in bed.

So, given the torch's history and recent controversy, my advice is save the embarrassment and snuff it out.

-Park Bencher