My Dutch wife is currently involved in organising trips for Dutch yacht enthusiasts to visit Weymouth next August but after an initial planning trip the visitors proclaimed the town a ‘funfair’.

The polite translation of this would be ‘cheap and cheerful’.

The impolite translation would be they thought Weymouth was a dump. Weymouth has missed an Olympic opportunity to attract a more discerning visitor.

Since the Olympic decision was made it will have had seven years to improve its image, but instead it seems intent on making a quick buck.

Visitors, other than the bucket and spade brigade, want decent hotels and restaurants, but many don’t hit the heights or cut the mustard I’m afraid.

The Dutch visitors have booked into a good hotel in Poole.

They will visit Weymouth for barely eight hours to see what they can of the racing from whichever clifftop doesn’t have a £20 entrance fee, before leaving to spend the night in London.

These people are not super rich but they do have standards.

They will spend virtually no money in Weymouth.

The Olympics will leave little Olympic legacy, apart from a forest of traffic lights.

Not one new hotel has been built for the biggest sporting event the town will ever see in its history.

Weymouth was only granted the Olympics because it has good winds (well done on that at least).

On every other critera it fails miserably.

I was brought up in Weymouth in the 1950s and 60s and still visit occasionally. I have charted its drift into south coast tackiness.

The opprobrium heaped on ‘my’ home town by these foreign visitors is frankly embarrassing.

I hope successive councils are happy with the total lack of imagination they have shown.

They have remained true to the English mentality of sticking with the status quo when there was a golden (silver, or at least a bronze) opportunity to do so much more.

Steve White

Almere

Netherlands