Olympics Update: London on Course for 2012 Olympics, arrangements underway
The organising committee of the London 2012 Olympics is confident of pulling off a special show two years ahead of the 30th edition of the games that are considered the pinnacle of sports.
The head of the organising team Lord Coe claims to be fully aware of the organising challenges, yet feels confident that his team has done enough already to ensure that the games turn out to be the best ever, as his team's £9.3 billion building programme is on schedule.
Coe, who himself had the experience of participating in the games twice as a distance runner in 1980 and 1984, feels that the people of the city are looking forward to the greatest sporting spectacle. He added that as an incentive for the fans of the games, the ticket prices would be kept affordable.
Coe, who is a follower of the Conservative party spoke only days ahead of an official tour of the Olympic Park, that will be taken by the members of media both from the United Kingdom and elsewhere in the world with an aim of spreading awareness on the preparations for the games.
The motive behind the exercise is also to marks the two-year countdown to the event.
The Olympic Park site is being built in the Stratford area east of London, and the preparations are well and truly underway with most of the infrastructure in place.
"We are pretty much where we would want to be, where we planned to be at this stage, and we're in that phase of delivery where we're effectively going operational," said Coe.
"We've got a lot of things in place, we've spent a lot of time planning and figuring out just how this is going to work and the teams and the partnerships that we need to have in place. Now this is about the two years of operational delivery."
Coe was happy with the organisation of the football world cup by the South Africans, but added that that organising an Olympic Games event was a far greater challenge with many complex problems to deal with, considering the vast number of sports and athletes involved in the games.
He said: "Delivering a World Cup, it's a wonderful tournament but it's in the foothills of complexity compared to the delivery of 26, really 52, simultaneous world championships."
Organisers of London 2012 have promised affordable ticket prices for the vast majority, as Coe mentioned that the tickets would be "accessible" to most Londoners brushing aside fears of "traffic h**l" for residents of the city.
He said: "It's not going to be traffic h**l. It's not going to be business as usual. We've got an Olympic Games here, Londoners get that and they want to be a part of it and the ticket prices we've already talked about, you know, they will be accessible prices, and we've done a lot to look at the event flow and the length of the schedules”.
Meanwhile the budget allocated to the organising committee of the games is a staggering £2 billion.
The amount has been raised from almost £1 billion in television broadcast fees, more than £600 million in sponsorship.
The committee also aims to earn an amount of £441 million from ticket sales for the game, which are set to take place from July 27 until August 12, 2010.
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