UK News

from Newsmaker:

Thomson Reuters Newsmaker with Sebastian Coe and Hugh Robertson

To mark the one year countdown to the London Olympics, Thomson Reuters held a Newsmaker event on July 21 with four-time Olympic medalist and chairman of the London Organising Committee for the Olympic Games, Sebastian Coe and Minister for Sport and the Olympics, Hugh Robertson MP. Below are highlights from the evening.

Legacy of 2012 includes economic dividend: Robertson

Transport system ready for 2012 demands: Coe

Olympic ticket sell-out is coup for London: Coe

from Newsmaker:

Tick, tick, tickets – defusing an Olympic PR bomb

-Adrian Warner is BBC London's Olympics Correspondent. The opinions expressed are his own.-

The morning after his surprise 800 metres defeat by Steve Ovett at the 1980 Moscow Olympics,  Seb Coe was sitting in his bed in the Olympic village when former decathlete and close friend Daley Thompson stormed into the room. Thompson went straight to the curtains and opened them up.

"What's the weather like?" Coe asked.

"Oh, it all looks a bit silver to me," Thompson replied.

Coe smiled but the comment hurt a bit. He had been favourite to beat his British rival in the 800 and was waking up to the disappointment of having missed out on an Olympic title. But Thompson's comment helped him to bounce back and produce one of the most memorable comebacks in Olympic history when he won the 1,500 a few days later.

Today Coe is facing the most challenging days he has faced as chairman of London 2012's organising committee. He is going to need some of that determination again with just over a year to go to the opening ceremony.

The way the tickets have been sold has not gone down well with the British public. With only one in 12 households in London estimated to have received tickets for the Games, Coe knows he has to get more people into the venues to keep the Olympic buzz in the capital. More than 1.2 million of the 1.9 million applicants missed out in the first round when the most attractive tickets went on sale. One survey by London's Evening Standard recently suggested more than half of the public thought the system was unfair.

from Left field:

West Ham given Olympic stadium nod but can soccer co-exist with track and field?

So now we know: Premier League soccer club West Ham United will take over the Olympic Stadium in London following the 2012 Games, assuming there are no late objections from the British government or the city's mayor.

The decision will be greeted with relief by many fans of the rival bidders Tottenham Hotspur for one simple reason -- soccer does not generally co-exist very well with athletics.

As far as I know there are just two football league clubs in England who play at a stadium incorporating a running track -- Brighton and Rotherham, though happy to be corrected if there are more -- and none in the top tier Premier League.

There are still some around Europe, but a bit of digging around by our reporters this morning suggests a general discontent with the situation.

Certainly, Bayern Munich fans were delighted to see their team move out of the Olympic Stadium and into the Allianz Arena, purpose built for the 2006 World Cup. Hertha Berlin play their games at Germany's other Olympic Stadium and from my own experience there the atmosphere is never great.

The problem soccer fans usually come back to again and again is that the running track puts too much distance between the fans and the pitch, destroying the atmosphere and making the ground a more comfortable place for the opposition to play.

So if West Ham are to preserve the Olympic legacy London promised they may have to make fans unhappy in the process. We shall see. Can't wait to see a game there post-London 2012 in any case.

from The Great Debate UK:

London 2012 – a chance to nurture strong female role models

-- Tessa Jowell is Britain's Minister for the Olympics and London and has held a variety of senior government posts. She has direct responsibility for delivery of the government's Olympic programme. Jowell has been a member of parliament for the Labour Party since 1992. The views expressed are her own. --

In 1896 a Greek woman called Stamata Revithi decided to run the inaugural modern day Olympic Marathon in Greece. Arriving in the Village of Marathon she was told by officials that she was not allowed to compete in the race the next day as the entry deadline had expired.

Today historians agree that the real reason for her exclusion was her gender - women were not allowed to compete in any of the events in the inaugural Olympic Games. This did not deter Revithi, who ran the marathon by herself the day after the main race, running her final lap around the outside of the main stadium as she wasn't allowed inside to officially mark the culmination of her five and a half hour run, in fact it would take nearly 100 years before women could compete in an Olympic Marathon at the 1984 Los Angeles Games.

This kind of discrimination seems unthinkable now but more than 120 years after Revithi ran through the streets of Greece women are still barred from over 40 Olympic events. In Paralympic sport the figures are worse with women unable to compete in nearly 50 per cent of events.

Although the International Olympic Committee has made some progress in this area - in 1980 women represented only 18 percent of athletes at the Moscow Games, a figure that had risen to 45 percent in Beijing last year - there is still a long way to go. I know that in some sports there may be historical reasons why women do not participate. But its time Olympic sport moved with the times.

With a global audience of billions the Olympics are perhaps the greatest show on earth. The men and women who compete in the Games inspire awe, wonder and respect for their talent and dedication. In short they become role models or sporting ‘heroes' that people, particularly children, look up to. And how often do women get the chance to see other women playing sport? There is more than 50 times as much coverage in the media for men's sport than women's, with just 2 percent of articles and 1 percent of images devoted to elite female athletes and women's sport.

Women watch the Olympics more than any other sporting event; this makes it even more important to me to pursue equal representation in the Olympic Games. Women, like men, need to have strong sporting role models to look up to like Paula Radcliffe, Rebecca Addlington or Christine Ohuruogu, just as they need to have strong role models to look up to in other areas of life whether that's Hillary Clinton or Kylie Minogue.

London 2012: Shopping for success

The frame of the 2012 Olympic main stadium stands out from among the piles of mud.

The skeletal metal structure, which will hold up the roof, rises above the construction site, three years ahead of the Games.

The only thing to challenge it is three concrete blocks – the shell of a massive shopping centre planned for the Olympic Park.

The Westfield centre may not be the centrepiece of the park in Stratford, east London, but it will be the main gateway.

Most visitors will have to walk through it to get to the venues. Organisers had once promoted the 242 million pound aquatics centre as the eye-catching gateway. Designed by the internationally renowned Iraqi-born architect Zaha Hadid, it will feature a wave-like roof that is so complicated extra money was needed for its construction.

Now it appears it will only be seen after going past rows of shop window fronts.

Westfield will form part of the legacy, providing shops, restaurants and cafes for residents living in the 3,000 flats and apartments after the Games.

So how are the Olympics going for you?

  *** For full Olympic coverage click here ****

Into the vaccuum of hard news leap the Olympics, with wall-to-wall coverage from Beijing of the last summer games before they come to Britain.

Some people love it of course, and could probably have told you what the world 100 metres men’s record was or how many times Mark Spitz won gold in the pool even before the avalanche of previews began.

Others always have been and always will be entirely indifferent to 99 percent of the sports featured in the Olympics and either reserve their passion for the World Cup or avoid the great sporting occasions altogether.

Are you getting into the swing of the Games as Friday’s opening approaches, and do you look forward to them coming to Britain in 2012?  

An Olympian task trying to please the hacks

After the controversy surrounding the London 2012 Olympic logo, reporters wondered just how wacky the design for the main stadium would be.

The jigsaw-like logo, which is supposed to resemble the date of the Games, was criticised for being too abstract, while its animated flashing version was said to pose a health hazard.

But when the press, sponsors and VIPs sat down on a pile of mud at the building site in Stratford in east London, you could feel the muted disappointment among the hacks. After all, hadn’t the cost of the stadium shot up by 77 percent to 496 million pounds?

Where were the towers or the arches? Where were the wings or the sails?

Not even being told we were sitting on the finishing line seemed to lift the spirits.

The designer tried to convince us, saying the wrap around the stadium may feature a mosaic, with pixelated images of athletes which will come into focus from afar.

Athletes attending did their best when they said they had goose pimples just seeing the warm-up area. And there was clapping among the VIPs.