First, a couple of extra things you might not have realised about the structure that was announced this week as the iconic centrepiece of the Olympic Park legacy.

Although the ArcelorMittal Orbital tower will not be as tall as the Eiffel tower - barely a third of its height, in fact - the information sheet accompanying the design’s launch offers an ingenious alternative reading.

Apparently, if you were to flatten out all the new Tower of London’s convoluted steel loops - and more than one observer has sounded ready to do this in the space of the last few days - then yes, it would be taller than the Eiffel tower. It would laugh at the Eiffel tower, in fact.

Should this distortion to Anish Kapoor’s latest inspiration take place, with its 1,400 tonnes of steel being stretched out like a long steel rope, we are told it would be about 560 metres long.

(About? They’ve been designing this thing for months - can’t they even give us an exact figure on its stretched length?)

And consider this: if that steel were further reduced until it resembled tinfoil, then it would comfortably wrap the biggest chicken the world has ever seen. Or turkey, depending on how history judges.

But let’s be serious for a moment.

OK. Let’s continue.

In introducing Anish Kapoor’s new design to a conference room stuffed with television, radio and written media, London’s Mayor Boris Johnson acknowledged that its unusual, some might say challenging, some have said catastrophic aspect might well inspire other names than the title which acknowledges the steel magnate whose £16 million input gave the whole project legs. Sorry, lattice.

"Some may choose to think of it as a Colossus of Stratford," Johnson said, his eye roving over the assembled throng, as is his wont, like that of an old-time music-hall artist.

"Some eyes may detect a giant treble clef, a helter-skelter, a supersized mutant trombone. Some may even see the world's biggest ever representation of a shisha pipe and call it the Hubble Bubble. But I know it is the ArcelorMittal Orbit and it represents the dynamism of a city coming out of recession, the embodiment of the cross-fertilisation of cultures and styles that makes London the world capital of arts and culture."

So there’s the theory. While the Skylon, the cigar-like structure suspended on the South Bank to mark the Festival of Britain in 1951, was toppled the following year on the orders of Winston Churchill and rumoured to have been turned into ashtrays, this marker is going to be a slow burner.

(Although these two edifices appear to have something in common. Kapoor insists that his latest venture "looks like something that would not want to stand up."  Back in the post-war austerity of 1951, the joke was that, like the British economy, the Skylon "had no visible means of support.")

Kapoor maintains that he is "not afraid" of the images that his creation may suggest to the viewing public.

Reaction certainly seems to have ranged from the incredulous to the outraged. The deep-red, winding construction has been compared by some to bloody entrails. Personally I was put in mind of ET in chains.

But then negative reaction to such major construction initiatives is par for the course - a badge of honour, even.

Originally, Gustave Eiffel wanted to build his tower in Barcelona to mark the Universal Exposition of 1888. But the inhabitants of Barcelona’s city hall thought it would be a strange and incongruous monstrosity.

So Eiffel transferred his project to home ground - where, when it was constructed as a centrepiece for the 1889 World’s Fair in Paris, it was widely denounced as an eyesore.

One letter published in a French newspaper deplored the prospect of looking out over Paris and seeing "stretching out like a black blot the odious shadow of the odious column built up of riveted iron plates."

The signatories included writers Alexandre Dumas and Guy de Maupassant, although the latter was later spotted dining regularly at the odious column’s highly reputed restaurant. Asked why he was there, considering his objections to the tower, he replied that it was the one place in Paris where one could not see it.

So the ET tower - just my name, probably won’t catch on - is destined to have some difficult PR days before it takes its place in the bosom of the British people.

I think, however, I may have spotted something in the launch details which will ensure its continuing, indeed, growing success as a London icon.

Although the official literature described it as 115 metres high, by the end of the press conference at City Hall, Johnson insisted it was 118 metres high.

This tower, then, is growing at the rate of three metres a day.

Which means that, by the time the Games are declared over on August 12, 2012, on my calculation, the erection in the park will be 2,662 metres high, making it comfortably twice the size of the world’s current tallest building, the 828 metres-high Burj Khalifa tower in Dubai.

And by the turn of the century, the Olympic Park tower will be so tall that it will make the mythical Beanstalk that Jack climbed, believed to have been destroyed by an earthquake in 371 BC, look no more than a puny weed in comparison.

Put it this way. If you stretched London buses end-to-end in an effort to match it, you would run out of buses - even if you managed to get some of the old, bendy stock which Boris Johnson’s predecessor as Mayor so waywardly installed on the streets of the capital…

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