There was a strange discrepancy in the language used by Baroness Margaret Ford as she made today’s announcement - or perhaps that should be confirmation, given the way news had leaked out - that West Ham rather than Spurs were getting the nod from the Olympic Park Legacy Company’s board to take over the Olympic stadium post-2012.

As she took her place at the end of an oddly displaced podium inside the vast, architecturally unsympathetic edifice of the Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre, the redoubtable chair of the OPLC reminded me quite a lot of Professor McGonagall, the character Maggie Smith plays in the Harry Potter films.

Sitting alongside her - for reasons that never became clear given that, as she was quick to mention, there was only a very limited amount of time and leeway for questions following the announcement – were fellow Board members Philip Lewis, Keith Edelman, the former managing director of Arsenal, and the OPLC’s chief executive, Andrew Altman.

The latter contributed a sentence or two. The others departed like unused substitutes. Rather a pointless exercise for men of such knowledge and experience.

But back to Dame Margaret’s strange discrepancy. In describing the process which has stirred so much speculation, politicking and rancour in recent months, she played it very straight.

"We have enjoyed complete freedom to make this recommendation," she insisted, quietly and evenly. "I can say that absolutely
honestly its one of the things the Noard has felt. We are most grateful to the Mayor and the Ministers for complete freedom to act objectively and dispassionately."

And yet the language she employed in confirming that West Ham would be the preferred bidders was anything but dispassionate: "We are confident that this represents the very best legacy for the stadium, it’s cracking for the communities of East London, it’s great for Londoners, it’s very good news for the UK taxpayer.. and it’s also got a very good outcome for sport."

In the lead-up to the recommendation just made, Tottenham’s chairman Daniel Levy - aware of the huge groundswell of resistance among his club’s supporters to the idea of shifting the club into the traditional West Ham territory of Stratford - urged the fans to "remove the emotion" in considering such a move.

"Remove the emotion." Not a bad motto for the Tottenham bid; but football, and sport, can never be separated from emotion. That is why people care about football sport. In that sense, it isn’t business.

So on the one hand, Baroness Ford insisted that the decision to favour West Ham’s plan was a dispassionate one, and that the only formula applied was how well the rival bids met the five specified evaluation objectives.

They were - just to remind you - achieving a "viable long-term solution" which provides "value for money"; capability of creating a legacy; re-opening stadium as soon as possible after the 2012 Games; ensuring it remains a "distinctive physical symbol" supporting the regeneration of the surrounding area; and, lastly, allowing flexible sporting and community use.



Baroness Ford also maintained each of these five requirements was similarly weighted.

But let’s look again at requirement number four - that the stadium should remain a "distinctive physical symbol". What is that, if not emotional?

It is hard to see, too, how Spurs could have ticked this box, given that they planned to knock the Olympic stadium down.

Is there an argument that their new, football-focused stadium would have provided a similar function with regard to the "economic, physical and social regeneration of the surrounding area"? Surely not. Tottenham’s stadium would have been no more nor less than a symbol of their own fiscal wisdom. Sensible, laudable even, in business terms.

But it is idle to maintain that this decision could ever be a simple business choice.

In another outbreak of refreshing, but far from dispassionate language, Baroness Ford admitted that she had "taken the hump from time to time" over the sniping and bickering from many interested parties that had taken place before the announcement, adding: "But I’m a big girl, and this is a public process."

Some of the most strident comments came from Lamine Diack, President of the International Association of Athletics Federations, and a member of the International Olympic Committee, who said that, within the sporting circles he frequented, Britain’s sporting reputation would be "dead" if they, as he saw it, reneged on the commitment given to the IOC in Singapore six years ago when London’s bid for the 2012 Games won the vote.

The man who spearheaded that outstanding campaign, Lord Sebastian Coe, subsequently endorsed that view when he remarked acidly:

"I'm prepared to revisit my words but I don't recall a whole heap about bulldozing down a publicly-funded community facility, replacing it with a football club and inspiring a generation of Tottenham season ticket holders, however many there may be on a waiting list.

"It's serious we deliver what we said we were going to unless we're prepared to trash our reputation."

OK, these words were spoken by a Chelsea supporter. But there is no avoiding the fact that the board’s decision - which is expected to be ratified by the Legacy Company’s founder members, the Mayor of London’s office and the Government - is strategically necessary to assure that Britain’s sporting reputation, already compromised by successive failures to make good on bids for the 2003, 2005 and 2015 World Athletics Championships, is not besmirched to the point of embarrassment.

Well might Coe have described himself as "delighted" with the decision.

In his regular press conference today, Arsenal’s manager Arsene Wenger addressed the problem which West Ham now have to confront, whether they remain in the Premier League or not, namely how to fill a 60,000-seater stadium, and how to ensure the club’s supporters do not have the intensity of their experience dissipated by the intervention of 35 metres of athletics track.
Having joked about the need for "good ballboys who are quick around the pitch", Wenger went on to say:  "It could change it for the fans, and the atmosphere, a little bit. I think they were always trapped a little bit in the fact that England promised to keep it as a track and running field and to keep the word to the Olympic Committee. It was very important to them."

Nobody pretends that West Ham want a track around their field of dreams in and ideal world. Baroness Ford would make no comment today on whether the board meeting, which overran by almost two hours, had been taken up with inserting any penalty clauses into the contract to ensure that the track would not be ripped up sooner rather than later.

But if, as she reported, the recommendation was unanimous, and yet the board meeting was "robust", it was hard to think what else would they have been talking about?

If the decision truly might have gone either way this morning, then Newham Council and West Ham did awfully well to put out a long press release welcoming the outcome exactly 10 minutes after the recommendation had been announced by Baroness Ford’s fair lips.

Soon afterwards the Minister of Sport and the Olympics, Hugh Robertson, turned up like the Cheshire cat to brief another media scrum on the fact that just such guarantees about the track had been sought.

A lot of attention, then, has been paid to saving a track. But really, it’s about saving reputation.

In short, an emotional thing.

Mike Rowbottom, one of Britain's most talented sportswriters, has covered the last five Summer and four Winter Olympics for The Independent. Previously he has worked for the Daily Mail, The Times, The Observer, the Sunday Correspondent and The Guardian. He is now chief feature writer for insidethegames