One Premier League football club is going to be the underserving beneficiary of a budget fiasco

Apart from Seb Coe, who is trying to honour a promise, and a few athletes who are defending the sport they love, no one in this country can seriously believe athletics needs an arena with 60,000 seats, even after the 2012 Olympics, which have been invested by governments with a hypnotic power to turn us all into hammer throwers and 800 metres runners.

At the heart of the face-off between Spurs and West Ham over the Stratford stadium is a myth that needs a javelin to be run right through it. The London Olympics are not going to send 60,000 Britons scurrying after a ticket for a grand prix track-and-field event, not in a country where only a few thousand habitually show up for meets at Crystal Palace or Gateshead.

This is not footballing myopia. The starting point for any discussion about the Stratford monolith is that £547m has been spent to fulfil a commitment the London bid team probably never thought they would need to observe. When "London" emerged from Jacques Rogge's lips rather than the expected "Paris" our capital was lumbered with a mighty anomaly.

Wembley, an opera house for the pub band that are England, might have been constructed as a national sports stadium, with a removable track, if it needed to be built on that scale at all; but the Football Association's insistence that they needed a £750m arena solely for England, a couple of fading cup competitions and the play-offs ensured that a separate Olympic venue had to be constructed as the main stage for the Games.

From there £547m of partly public money was doused in fuel and set on fire to comply with the gigantism of the modern Olympics. In football the hubris is even worse. South Africa is now burdened with numerous potential white elephant stadiums that reflect Fifa's addiction to luxury.

UK Athletics - for much of their life a spectacularly unproductive organisation - are protecting a rare opportunity to bump their sport to the mainstream. They want West Ham to be granted preferred bidder status on 28 January and pursue their joint plan with Newham council to spend £100m on a conversion that would retain the running track.

For some the West Ham proposal more public spirited. Unusually it also unites the Olympic movement with the pornography trade, where Ham's owners made much of their money. The dividend would be a gleaming home for track and field: a
place for runners, jumpers and throwers to gather after 2012 had achieved the vital proselytising breakthrough of bringing British children stampeding back to the sport.

Except that it will never happen. Athletics may rise in popularity but it will never compete with Spurs v Arsenal or West Ham v Man United as the hottest ticket on a midweek night. It will not surge from 6,000 to 60,000, which is why Tottenham's promise to redevelop Crystal Palace as a national hub is more honest and realistic than UK Athletics' attempt to bamboozle us into thinking a 60,000-seat auditorium for Jessica Ennis and company makes sense.

Intuitively most of us would rather see this ridiculously expensive project handed over to a sport that the people of east London can use and be inspired by. Few local children can hope to play for Spurs or West Ham.

Tottenham are being cast by some in the athletics lobby as opportunistic predators when the truth is that only they have submitted a plan that lifts the organisers off the hook of having to justify a £547m splurge.

Jessica Ennis

By this strange twist of reasoning demolishing a new half-a-billion-pound structure built with public funds turns out to be a lesser folly than erecting it in the first place. It is sophistry to pretend Olympic stadiums are traditionally handed over to track and field in perpetuity. In Sydney, after 2000, the lanes were rolled up and the infield colonised by team sports, as had been the case in Montreal, Los Angeles and Atlanta before. You would be unwise, too, to expect news of sell-out track-and-field nights in Beijing until the Bird's Nest hosts the world championships in 2015.

London's calamity was to win the 2012 bid without having a sensible scheme for the main stadium, and so now the taxpayer is in the lamentable position of having either to subsidise the dreams of Karren Brady, David Gold and David Sullivan at West Ham or to assist Spurs in escaping the planning complications they encountered in the proposed redevelopment of White Hart Lane.

Track and field, which was synonymous with incompetence and neglect, will need to rebuild its support base gradually, with the help of a bright new generation of athletes (Ennis leads the way), rather than rattle around in a 60,000-seat bowl surrounded by West Ham imagery. Crystal Palace - if Spurs are made to rebuild it properly and transport links are improved - is a more viable heartland.

One Premier League football club is going to be the undeserving beneficiary of a budget fiasco (poor old Leyton Orient miss out), for which the blame should fall on the politicians who deceived us with those dodgy costings when London saw off Paris. For them the West Ham-Spurs tussle is a nice distracting sideshow.