Tottenham maintain Olympic stadium interest is 'deadly serious'

Tottenham Hotspur will discover today whether their scheme to redevelop White Hart Lane into a 60,000-seat arena has been given the London mayor's approval. A planning meeting at City Hall will determine whether they have received the consents that are central to ambitions of staying at their home of 111 years. In parallel, there is an application to become the anchor tenant of the Olympic Stadium in Stratford. Far be it from Digger to suggest that the latter is only an attempt to play off the Olympic Park Legacy Company against those with whom the decision for White Hart Lane rests. It is interesting, though, that the mayor, Boris Johnson, also sits on the OPLC board. "If the Olympic Park Legacy Company decides our bid is the preferred one, then we'll put all our efforts behind trying to move there," said the Tottenham Hotspur director, Sir Keith Mills. He, incidentally, was also the chief executive of the London 2012 bid company that vowed athletics would be central to the Games' legacy. Paradoxically, Tottenham's Stratford project would be as a single-use football stadium. It would be significantly cheaper than a £450m redevelopment at the Lane, so maybe the Spurs board is, as Mills says, "deadly serious" after all. But doubts might arise as a month before the OPLC chooses its preferred bidder Spurs have not submitted a firm proposal, although their plans will become firmer after tomorrow's decision at City Hall. Their competitors in the Olympic-Stadium tender process, West Ham United, plan to pay back a multimillion-pound annual dividend to the taxpayer within 10 years if their multi-use scheme is approved Testing times Martin Johnson says he is surprised more rugby players do not test positive for drugs given that his sport has such a strict testing regime in place. It comes as no surprise, therefore, that more footballers do not. Rugby hopes to be granted Olympic status and readily bowed to the World Anti‑Doping Agency's demands for a registered testing pool of players who are willing to be placed under house arrest for an hour a day in case a tester turns up at their door. Football is already an Olympic sport and despite the Fifa president, Sepp Blatter, being on the Wada executive board, the game has been dragging its feet. Two years after the UK anti-doping agency was set up there is still no registered testing pool at the Football Association. But as EU Athletes, a body of players' federations, attacks the pools concept in Brussels and Strasbourg on human-rights grounds perhaps football's path – which avoids expensive defences of individual legal actions – is the wisest. Naming in the frame Several Premier League players have cause for distraction after a footballer failed in his high-court attempt to secure an extension to his privacy order this week. Digger knows of multiple individuals whose identities cannot be revealed because of their injunctions prohibiting newspaper revelations. A parallel closed hearing is under way at the high court over the attempt by a celebrity to block tabloid reports on his life. If the courts find against that individual then the prohibitive "super-injunctions" that prevent even the naming of a celebrity who has moved against the media could become a thing of the past. And that would remove a tool our top players employ more often these days than Ralgex. Projection problems Westminster City Council has dropped its threat of legal action against Cricket Australia over its pre-Ashes stunt of projecting holograms of two of its players on Big Ben. The council's threat, first revealed in Digger , had been withdrawn after it claimed that CA had undertaken never to repeat the prank without obtaining prior permission. Ahead of the London Olympics, however, CA's holograms have caused Westminster to push the government to introduce more stringent penalties for offenders than the current £2,500 maximum fine.