Today marks two years until the start of London 2012. A breathtaking series of events are planned to mark the milestone, including the launch of a volunteering programme and the opening of the first official shop. Follow the thrills and spills here

3.54pm:

Right, that’s it. Most of the activities celebrating the fact the games start two years today have finished. So what have we learned, apart from the fact that there is now an official London 2012 shop open at St Pancras?

• Sir Chris Hoy can still ride a bike. This is good news.

• Londoners could make a small fortune letting out their homes during the games. Up to £5,000 per week, according to the Times.

• Wenlock, one of the official London mascots, is available in soft toy form. But he costs £25. You can also try and win him.

• If you decide to buy Wenlock, don’t try and use your Mastercard. “In recognition of Visa’s longstanding support of the Olympic and Paralympic Games, the London 2012 Shop is proud to only accept card payments by Visa.”

• The Olympic park is really beginning to take shape. Some of the buildings, particularly the velodrome and the swimming arena, look amazing – as this Guardian gallery shows.

Thanks for following the blog today and for all your comments.

2.25pm:

Lord Coe is telling Sophie Rayworth that there will be more tickets widely available than any event in history.

He also says there is as much chance of getting a ticket for the 100m final through the ballot as there is for any other event.

If you so wish, you can register on the London 2012 website for the latest information on tickets.

Around eight million tickets will be available for the games, according to the website. The tickets go on sale next year.

Interestingly it seems people will only be able to make card payments using Visa at the Olympics. “In recognition of Visa’s support of the Games, the London 2012 Olympic Games and Paralympic Games are proud to accept only Visa cards (debit, credit and prepaid), along with cash and cheques.”

1.57pm:

Footage is emerging on the news channels of Sir Chris Hoy cycling around the makeshift track in the London velodrome. It appears Boris Johnson has also had a go around the temporary track, albeit somewhat more slowly.

PA reports that Hoy was “watched by a crew of cheering builders” on the 75m track.

“Just walking in here you get the feeling that this is an Olympic venue,” Hoy said.

“This is where it is going to take place and hopefully where I will win one more Olympic gold medal.

“Just looking up at the stand and even the cheers from the construction workers, you can feel what it will be like when it is full to the rafters and being in an Olympic final.

“You can really sense it is getting more enthusiastic – two years to go, I really cannot wait.”

1.33pm:

Another YouTube video, this time from Pearcesport. aka James Pearce, the BBC’s sports news correspondent, who was one of the people allowed into the Olympic Stadium this morning.

The video shows the short (very short) track which has been laid for Michael Johnson to run around on later today. According to the documents I have here, he will sprint against youngsters at 2.30pm. Hurray!

1.10pm:

My colleague Matt Wells, displaying a disturbingly close knowledge of Doctor Who, has sent me the following email explaining his “little shop” comment below the line.

The episode is Smith and Jones, starring Tennant. The doctor and his then assistant, Martha, are hiding from the Judoon (who are not very nice) in the Royal Hope hospital, which has been transferred to the moon, for the purposes of the plot.

“Ah, you’ve got a little shop. I like a little shop!” he says. It is ironic, obviously, to be thinking about retail opportunities, given the danger he is in.

That will be all.

12.55pm:

kayewiggins has uploaded a video of Boris Johnson talking about the volunteering scheme to YouTube.

He says at least 8,000 people will be able to be London ambassadors, maybe more if sufficient sponsorship can be acquired.

12.38pm:

BBC One is screening a live “special news” programme – called, fittingly, “London 2012: Two Years to Go” – from the Olympic stadium in Stratford from 2.15pm.

As KenBarlow points out below the line, you can purchase 30cm Wenlock soft toys rather than pitting your wits against others in a bid to win one.

The mascot is a snip at £25.00 (plus £4.95 standard delivery).

12.30pm:

We (Lexy Topping and I – it was doubles) lost. 11-3, 11-7. Mostly my fault.

12.03pm: Fittingly, given the subject of this live blog, I have to pause here to go and play table tennis – a first round match in the Kings Place Occupiers’ Championship. (Really).

Will be back shortly.

11.54am: Owen Gibson has written a comprehensive progress report on preparations for London 2012.

Two years from today, the Olympic flame will be lit in a stadium that is now all but finished on a site in east London that is looking more and more as it will in July 2012. This time next year, test events will begin. All of a sudden, there is not much time left.

Despite the worst recession for 70 years, the construction of the venues is on track. “We’re in a remarkably good place,” said the sports and Olympics minister, Hugh Robertson. “As at today, we are marginally ahead of where we ought to be in construction terms and on budget, which is an extraordinarily good position to be in.”

As confidence grows that the London Olympics will avoid an Athens-style meltdown, attention will turn to the operational issues for which the London organising committee (Locog), chaired by Lord Coe, is responsible.

You can also read progress reports on individual sports on our London 2012: two years to go keyword page.

If you don’t win a 30cm soft replica of Wenlock.

11.35am: The BBC has opened up its archive of footage from the 1948 London Olympics.

The 1948 Olympics section of its website has pictures, news stories, video and audio from the “austerity Olympics”.

When the Olympic Games came to London in 1948 it was visiting a city still suffering from the ravages of the second world war. Rationing was still in force, many people had been left homeless and yet the bomb cratered city rose to the challenge of hosting the world’s greatest sporting occasion.

These “austerity Olympics” were not only the first post-war games, but also the first Olympics where British television played a role. This collection of programmes and photographs looks back at the games, remembering the athletes who took part and revealing the BBC’s role in televising the events.

The collection includes a broadcast from Prime Minister Clement Attlee offering a “warmest welcome” to the athletes who have travelled to London, and a video news piece informing viewers that the BBC had used for the first time “its latest EMI outside broadcast equipment” to screen some events.

11.10am: To celebrate the fact there are only two years to go until the games, fans of weird-looking droplets of steel can win a soft toy of one of London 2012′s official mascots.

Three 30cm replica of Wenlock (the more aggressive looking one) can be secured by answering two questions on Twitter and Facebook.

More details about the competition on the official London 2012 website.

10.52am: The Times reports today that Londoners could rent out their homes for “up to three times the market rate during the Olympics”, with a four bedroom house potentially fetching up to £5,000 a week.

British athletes are training hard to win medals at the London Olympics but homeowners may also strike gold. Some properties will be rented out for up to three times the normal market rate during the event, with a fourbedroom house in London fetching up to £5,000 a week.

The paper quotes Tom Impey, lettings manager at Green Homes estate agents in Stratford, who says there are few hotels close to the Olympic area.

“If you had a property that would normally rent for £750 per week, you could push that up to £1,500 for the Olympic month,” he told the Times. “I’ve already had enquiries, as Londoners are looking to cash in.”

The article reckons homes in Greenwich which would normally be let for £800 a week could be listed for as much as £2,400 during the Olympics.

10.40am: Mayor of London Boris Johnson is heavily involved with the various ceremonies today. Judging from his Twitter feed, the good Mayor appears to be enjoying himself.

Amid messages notifying followers that “I’m on BBC Breakfast shortly talking about the Olympics“, the Mayor has posted a photograph from inside the Olympic stadium, and also had his picture taken with Diversity.

Amid his mingling the Mayor has also posted a link to the newly launched website for those wanting to volunteer to help out at the games.

The website has a quiz to enable hopefuls to find out if they’d be suited to the role.

The quiz takes the form of multiple choice. Question 5 asks “What are you really looking forward to?” (About being a volunteer).

One of the possible answers, C, is “Meeting Boris Johnson, what a legend.”

I wonder how hands-on the Mayor’s role was in preparing the quiz.

10.25am:

The BBC has reporters stationed around the Olympic Park, with one having just filed from the cycling velodrome where Chris Hoy will be showing his stuff later today.

The velodrome, although it has a roof, still looks pretty much like a building site. The track – which will be “Iberian pine” according to the reporter – hasn’t been laid yet, so instead the great Hoy will ride around a white marking on the concrete floor.

A report from the Basketball Arena, where later today former NBS star John Amaechi will shoot “into a temporary hoop”, according the PR stuff I have here, suggests Amaechi better not try bouncing the ball – the floor appears to be sand, giving it the look of an equestrian arena, rather than a basketball one.

10.00am: Rejoice! Rejoice! London 2012 is now a mere two years away. And the even better news is that the Olympic Delivery Authority has prepared an action-packed day of fun, lest the milestone pass unremarked.

Follow the latest here as the Olympic volunteering programme is launched (with the help of dance group Diversity and the Mayor of London) and a shop is opened at St Pancras International, before the media and dignitaries catch a train to the Olympic Park site.

From there, stay tuned as Chris Hoy cycles around the newly opened Olympic velodrome, Michael Johnson races, and presumably beats, youngsters on a temporary track in the stadium, and much, much more!*

And nobody mention today’s news that half of Britain’s Olympic sports could have their funding slashed. Besides, once that shop is open, worries over finance will surely pass into distant memory.

*not that much more.

]]> http://london-2012-olympics.net/News/london-olympics-2012-two-years-to-go/feed/ 0 http://london-2012-olympics.net/News/timber-ceiling-completed-on-velodrome/ http://london-2012-olympics.net/News/timber-ceiling-completed-on-velodrome/#comments Fri, 02 Jul 2010 11:09:00 +0000 admin http://www.london-2012-olympics.net/2012-olympic-news/timber-ceiling-completed-on-velodrome/ The final timber panels have been fitted into place on the London 2012 Velodrome’s roof, making the building water-tight and allowing work to continue inside ready for the cycling track installation this autumn.

It seems all that counts in 2012 is getting gold medals. So forget any proper investment in sport

Weirdly, it was then thought, Tony Blair chose to launch his 2001 manifesto in a school: St Saviour’s and St Olave’s, Southwark. Perhaps forgetting the traditional affinity between deranged leaders and parties of dumbstruck children, Clare Short said it was an “odd” thing to do. Simon Hughes thought it “bizarre”. Alastair Campbell, having choreographed the show, complained that the media “were pretty cynical about the whole event”. But it worked well enough for his rivals to want to copy the technique, minus the time-consuming prayers and hymns, and to use it repeatedly ever since.

Nowadays, it’s the press conference which has no blameless human wallpaper that looks faintly wrong. Were there problems with the police-check? Why, otherwise, would a visionary not want to emulate Blair, Michelle Obama and David Cameron, and recruit a sea of juvenile extras to reinforce the message of hope and transformation, or in the Queen or Gordon Brown’s case, unguessed-at reserves of vivacity? Within the last week, Scottish teens have showcased what a playful prime minister we’ve just lost, while in a London college pre-voters massed around Nick Clegg, who needed something to illustrate “the biggest shake-up of our democracy” since the Great Reform Act.

But it’s when something suspect or disreputable needs to be sanitised, that youth scenery comes into its own. Tasked with passing off his grotesque Olympic mascots as a piece of premier British design, Lord Coe commissioned two of the world’s most trusted cynicism deflectors: a crowd of primary school children and an endorsement by Michael Morpurgo. Old enough to say “it’s cool” to reporters, but too young to condemn an aesthetic outrage, Coe’s children also embodied the revised Olympic message: it’s totally about kids. The designer’s brief, we learned, was “to create mascots that would excite and inspire young people and encourage them to get involved in sport”. Wenlock, named after the Shropshire site of Britain’s first Olympic revival, was a special token of this idealistic commitment. Along with his mate, the puppet is expected to raise £15m for Coe’s organising committee.

“By linking young people to the values of sport”, his lordship announced, “Wenlock and Mandeville will help inspire kids to strive to be the best they can be.” Thus, the more the school children contradicted the only possible adult response to these role models (that of reflexive disgust) the more they confirmed that the games are, already, generating near-spiritual fervour in the next generation.

What does it matter if adults can only see a pair of bifurcated mobile phones, with Mandeville’s eye-catching groin definition creepily hinting at of mascottian oestrus or, possibly, a urinary tract infection? The characters were not designed to please grown-ups, any more than those comparative beauties, Iggle Piggle from In the Night Garden, or Waybuloo‘s Nok Tok. If years of CBeebies has taught us anything, it’s that the more outlandish the puppet-friend, the more beneficial its company will prove to child development. Coe’s mascots may have much to teach us. In a world where we so often judge by appearance, for instance, there is perhaps a virtue in promoting these pitiful creatures that is also consistent with a logo, opening parade and metal tower which promise to make the London games the ugliest in Olympic history. Other than that, however, Coe’s “values of sport”, as mediated by the mascots, remain elusive, even contradictory. The mascots tell children to “be the best they can be”. Yet, as children saw in the Beijing Olympics, being the best you can be is not as good as winning. Far from it. Even 14-year-old British diver, Tom Daley, who impressed supporters just by being there, looked distraught after his best efforts failed, as the Canadians like to put it, to own the podium.

No wonder he was anxious: the head of UK sport, John Steele, described the spectacle of British athletes striving but not winning in Vancouver as “disappointing”. It was great, of course, that Amy Williams won gold: “But it did represent the bottom of the medal range. We are not going to sugar-coat the fact that on the targets we set we’d like to have seen closer to the middle of the range.”

Targets? Although Wenlock and Mandeville were happy, in their first episode, to scamper about in front of the telly, they will soon, no doubt, be explaining to children why there is no point in a mascot, even an elite one, jumping out of a window and setting off along a publicly funded rainbow if it doesn’t have a track record of finding pots of gold. Where 2012 is concerned, sports officials have decided that a fourth place for Britain would be respectable, requiring the winning of 17 gold medals, following appropriate investment. Swimming and cycling are the sports best placed to satisfy these patriots with an improved “market share” of the glory, to use the National Audit Office term.

“The athletes need to be world class to earn extra funding,” says Steele, “and we are not here to bail out sports which cannot govern themselves correctly but reward those who show potential.” Lots of sports, school children will gather from his grim analysis, are such a waste of space that it’s no wonder there’s nowhere to play them. In fact, any young people who feel inspired by Lord Coe’s twinkling mascots to pursue their own Olympic dream should probably have another think.

It’s not for everyone, sport. It’s for winners. “Medals are the aim of our funding as we have a responsibility to the British public,” Steele explains, though the public was never actually consulted on its investment in his empire. “It is crucial to get as many athletes on the podium as possible.”

Although staging this celebration of international fellowship evidently adds to the pressure to beat everyone else, home advantages are thought to offer the host six or seven extra gold medals it might not otherwise have won (which would price ours, I think, at around £1.3bn each). Along with a few east London sports facilities this would, unlike the claimed enhancement of our young folk, at least be an identifiable part of the “legacy” to which Lord Coe and his fellow sports officials incessantly refer.

They must be unaware that the builders of the Dome, which was also justified as an inspiration to the nation’s youth, long ago showed that reliance on this word, outside the context of wills, dependably identifies both the speaker and the alleged inheritance as worthless. Back then, Labour would not listen, and the Tories became lucky bystanders at the historic immolation of public funds.

Did they learn anything at all? If so, it is not too late to purge the coming games of their most egregious flourishes and waste. And if not, let these mascots be a warning.

]]> http://london-2012-olympics.net/News/the-pitiful-olympic-mascots-sum-up-this-sorry-affair-catherine-bennett/feed/ 0 http://london-2012-olympics.net/News/great-britains-hopes-of-cycling-gold-at-london-2012-olympic-games-hit-by-uci-changes/ http://london-2012-olympics.net/News/great-britains-hopes-of-cycling-gold-at-london-2012-olympic-games-hit-by-uci-changes/#comments Thu, 06 May 2010 23:50:18 +0000 admin http://www.london-2012-olympics.net/2012-olympic-news/great-britains-hopes-of-cycling-gold-at-london-2012-olympic-games-hit-by-uci-changes/ Great Britain’s 2012 medal hopes took a blow as cycling’s world governing body announced a radical overhaul of the Olympics’ qualification criteria.