I have a confession to make: I have found it almost impossible to work up any interest in the high-pitched battle over the future of London’s Olympic stadium.

This would be forgivable in a member of the general public; for a supposed Olympic specialist though, it probably requires some explanation.

The nub of it is that I think it a pity that any commercially-driven Premier League football club needs to move in there.

Consequently, the identity of the club in question is a matter of complete indifference to me.

What strikes me as of primordial importance, by contrast, is that the athletics facilities where Usain Bolt & Co will weave their magic next year should be left intact for at least the next generation.

Why? I think the answer is self-evident to anyone who has been infused for the briefest moment by the Olympic spirit.

This is how Olympic sprinter Jeanette Kwakye put it when I interviewed her recently:

"You’ve got the Olympic Games.

"You are going to see some super performances in there in 18 months’ time.

"You’ve got kids like my sister.

"She’s 13 or 14.

"She’s going to see that and she’s going to think, ‘Wow! I really want to be able to do something like that’.

"Why couldn’t she have the opportunity to perform in a stadium that was built for that?

"Why are you going to shove her down the road at Crystal Palace where we have that every year anyway?

"Let’s have something special."

Let me put it another way.

For me, the most special moment of the 2004 Athens Olympics was waiting for the women’s marathon runners to arrive at the beautiful white marble stadium built for the first modern Olympiad in 1896.



What if that had been bulldozed on the grounds that it was obsolete and not used much any more?

I think it would have impoverished all of us.

And what about Berlin’s Olympic stadium, built for the notorious 1936 Olympics?

This is a monument in every sense and was still capable of staging football’s World Cup final as recently as 2006.

What if we’d not also maintained that as an athletics facility?

Well, to me, it would be like spitting in Jesse Owens’s face.

And this brings me on to the main point of writing this article.

If "legacy" is to be such an important piece of the Olympic jigsaw, as is plainly sensible, then we need to develop better tools for measuring it.

Very often, what is most valuable is hardest to quantify.

If we therefore discount it, we leave ourselves vulnerable to mistakes every bit as grave as the herd of "white elephants" that changed the Olympic mindset in the first place.

Let me offer a few examples from the event I have studied most closely, those 2004 Athens Games.

Plenty of publicity has been given - rightly - to the difficulties of identifying a viable after-life for several of the venues constructed for those Games.

What the Games organisers are not given enough credit for is the root-and-branch re-engineering of the Greek capital’s logistical arrangements and visitor facilities that the Olympics were key in bringing about.

"You can feasibly live in Corinth and work in Athens. That changes a great deal," as a long-time resident once told me.

"If you live in Corinth, you can…have an olive-grove if you feel like it."

How do you quantify such a benefit, much less decide how much of it to apportion to the Olympics?

With great difficulty - but such factors have to be given due consideration in any worthwhile cost-benefit analysis of the Games.

Again from Athens, I was told that, prior to the Games, there were only about 40 hotel rooms with wheelchair access in the entire city.

Should the Games take the credit for the upgrading of the city’s hotel stock that has transformed this situation?

Some of it, certainly.

And what about for making the Acropolis accessible to people with disabilities - a change that must have brought great joy to thousands upon thousands of people by now?

And the new Acropolis museum? Would that be open if the Games had not passed back through Athens?

Even a mundane traffic regulation - abolishing the right of drivers to disrupt the flow of traffic by turning left on a red light - implemented so as not to interrupt the Olympic lane, had, I was told, such an effect on journey-times that it was left in place.

A comprehensive study of the legacy of Athens 2004 would need to take careful account of all of this.

One of the main reasons, I feel, why so many people are so utterly confused about the whole concept of Olympic legacy is that those who talk about it - including the International Olympic Committee itself - usually have some sort of axe to grind.

For this reason, I think the IOC should consider funding the foundation of an independent Olympic legacy study group to weigh such matters in a dispassionate and systematic manner.

Two things would be essential to the success of such a body: 1) It must be independent, that is to say free to criticise any branch of the Olympic Movement when criticism was due; 2) Though financial expertise would be key, its members must not consist exclusively of economists and accountants.

David Owen worked for 20 years for the Financial Times in the United States, Canada, France and the UK. He ended his FT career as sports editor after the 2006 World Cup and is now freelancing, including covering the 2008 Beijing Olympics and 2010 World Cup. Owen’s Twitter feed can be accessed at www.twitter.com/dodo938