OLYMPIC GAMES

LONDON, United Kingdom (AFP) — Queen Elizabeth II will declare the London Olympics open on July 27, but while the stadiums are ready with 100 days to go, question marks hang over the security of the Games and transport.

When the flame is lit, London will become the first city in the modern era to host the Olympics three times, having already had the honour in 1908 and 1948.

Last time the event came to London, Britain was still gripped by the effects of World War II which had ended barely three years earlier and the makeshift approach earned it the label the "austerity Games".

With Britain's economy still in the doldrums, austerity will leave its mark on these Olympics too, albeit to a far lesser extent than in 1948, when competitors were housed in military barracks and university dormitories.

Despite a budget of 9.3 billion ($14.8 billion, 11.2 billion euros), the Games will be on a more modest scale than the spectacular 2008 Beijing Olympics at which China announced its growing global presence.

"We are not coming out as a superpower," noted Britain's Olympics Minister Hugh Robertson.

Prime Minister David Cameron is nevertheless promising "the greatest show on Earth" and "a celebration of everything that's great about Britain".

The job of putting the stamp of Britishness on the opening ceremony has been handed to Danny Boyle, the director of the multiple Oscar-winning Slumdog Millionaire.

With the theme "Isles of Wonder", Boyle has promised a fitting curtain-raiser before 10,500 competitors from 204 countries do battle.

When the sport begins, one of the big questions is whether China can maintain its performance of four years ago when on home soil it topped the medals table for the first time.

Two of the stars of those Olympics are set to make a huge impact again, with Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt likely to be the face of the Games, closely followed by US swimmer Michael Phelps, who won eight golds in China.

London's bid was based on the promise that hosting the Games would leave a lasting legacy for the city. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) believes it has achieved its aim so far — the residents' verdict will only come later.

After a final inspection last month, IOC president Jacques Rogge said London had created "a legacy blueprint" for future Games hosts.

Some of the venues on the Olympic Park, built in a deprived part of east London, will be maintained after the Games, while others will be retained but scaled down.

The future use of the 80,000-capacity Olympic Stadium has yet to be determined beyond hosting the 2017 World Athletics Championships, although West Ham United football club are among four bidders to take it over.

The long-neglected East End should continue to benefit from the new ultra-modern Stratford rail station as well as the low-cost housing made from some of the Olympic village accommodation and a nature park along the Lee Valley.

"We can already see tangible results in the remarkable regeneration of east London," Rogge said.

The two unanswered questions are weighty ones: the ability to get spectators and athletes around an already congested city; and security, 40 years since the bloody hostage-taking of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics.

Some $6.5 billion has been spent on modernising the transport system, including the world's oldest underground train system, and 48 kilometres (30 miles) of Olympic road lanes should help speed the travel of VIPs.

Ordinary Londoners though are being urged to work from home or spend an extra hour in the pub after work to ease peak-time congestion.

Security has cast a shadow since the day after London was awarded the Games, when suicide bombers killed 52 people on the transport system.

A combined force of more than 40,000 soldiers, police and private security guards will be mobilised for what Cameron called the "biggest and most integrated security operation in mainland Britain in our peacetime history".

Exercises have been held to prepare for every eventuality, but the possibility of disturbances was underlined by a protest swimmer who halted the traditional Oxford-Cambridge University Boat Race this month.

London Olympics Organising Committee chairman, Sebastian Coe is confident of delivering a "safe and secure" event but acknowledges the need to avoid a suffocating security blanket.

"You want people coming to London feeling that they are coming to a city that is celebrating and not overwhelmed by security," Coe told AFP.

"These are Olympic Games — they are taking place in London not siege-town. There is a balance to be struck."

Source: www.jamaicanobserver.com

Fears stringent restrictions on use of terms such as London 2012 will limit economic benefits of Games to capital's economy
Victoria Pendleton will not be able to tweet about tucking into her Weetabix on the morning of race day, or post a video message to fans from her room in the athletes' village.
Pub landlords will be banned from posting signs reading: "Come and watch the London Games from our big screen!"
Fans in the crowd won't be allowed to upload snippets of the day's action to YouTube – or even, potentially, to post their snaps from inside the Olympic Village on Facebook. And a crack team of branding "police", the Games organisers Locog have acknowledged, will be checking every bathroom in every Olympic venue – with the power to remove or tape over manufacturers' logos even on soap dispensers, wash basins and toilets.
With just a little more than three months to go until the opening of the London 2012 Games, attention is increasingly turning to what many legal experts consider to be the most stringent restrictions ever put in place to protect sponsors' brands and broadcasting rights, affecting every athlete, Olympics ticket holder and business in the UK.
Locog insists the protections were essential to secure the contracts that have paid for the Olympics, but some fear the effect could be to limit the economic benefits to the capital's economy – and set a precedent for major national celebrations in future.
Britain already has a range of legal protections for brands and copyright holders, but the Olympic Games demand their own rules. Since the Sydney Games in 2000, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) has required bidding governments to commit to introducing bespoke legislation to offer a further layer of legal sanction.
In 2006, accordingly, parliament passed the London Olympic Games and Paralympic Games Act, which, together with the Olympic Symbol (Protection) Act of 1995, offers a special level of protection to the Games and their sponsors over and above that already promised by existing copyright or contract law. A breach of these acts will not only give rise to a civil grievance, but is a criminal offence.
"It is certainly very tough legislation," says Paul Jordan, a partner and marketing specialist at law firm Bristows, which is advising both official sponsors and non-sponsoring businesses on the new laws. "Every major brand in the world would give their eye teeth to have [a piece of legislation] like this. One can imagine something like a Google or a Microsoft would be delighted to have some very special recognition of their brand in the way that clearly the IOC has."
As well as introducing an additional layer of protection around the word "Olympics", the five-rings symbol and the Games' mottoes, the major change of the legislation is to outlaw unauthorised "association". This bars non-sponsors from employing images or wording that might suggest too close a link with the Games. Expressions likely to be considered a breach of the rules would include any two of the following list: "Games, Two Thousand and Twelve, 2012, Twenty-Twelve".
Using one of those words with London, medals, sponsors, summer, gold, silver or bronze is another likely breach. The two-word rule is not fixed, however: an event called the "Great Exhibition 2012" was threatened with legal action last year under the Act over its use of "2012" (Locog later withdrew its objection).
A photoshoot promoting easyJet's new routes from London Southend airport was also interrupted by a Locog monitor after local athlete Sally Gunnell was handed a union flag to drape over her shoulders. According to reports, Locog felt this would create too direct an association with her famous pose after winning Olympic gold in Barcelona in 1992 (British Airways, rather than easyJet, is the airline sponsor of London 2012).
Locog chose not to comment on the incident, but aspokeswoman said: "If we did not take steps to protect the brand from unauthorised use and ambush marketing, the exclusive rights which our partners have acquired would be undermined. Without the investment of our partners, we simply couldn't stage the Games."
In this climate, according to Chris Moriarty of the Chartered Institute of Marketing, non-sponsoring brands are being forced to seek expensive legal advice on how to stay just the right side of the line.
He cites a campaign by Marks and Spencer, with the slogan On your marks for a summer to remember, which features union flags, an egg and spoon race and an oversized gold medal, neatly dancing around the guidelines. A campaign by Nike called Make it Count, featuring Olympic athletes Mo Farah and Paula Radcliffe has proved an even greater success: a survey of Tweeters found that Nike (a non-sponsor) is the brand they most associated with the Games, instead of Adidas, which paid £100m for official rights.
"Small businesses don't have the resources to have a creative campaign like that, but also, I detect, they are too scared to do anything, because the landscape is so complicated, and there are so many dos and don'ts," says Moriarty. "It would be an awful shame if small businesses were too afraid to gain from the biggest show on earth coming to London."
The CIM has called the restrictions around the London Games too draconian and raised concerns "that a precedent will have been set which unduly prohibits businesses tapping into current national and societal events".
One of the IOC's principal fears in seeking bespoke legislation was around so-called "ambush" marketing, according to Locog, where businesses try to leapfrog or otherwise wriggle around branding rules. At the 2010 World Cup, 36 female Dutch fans were thrown out of a match for wearing orange dresses without logos, in what organisers deemed an ambush campaign by the beer company Bavaria. (Fifa also requires bespoke branding legislation).
Industry experts believe the ambush battleground at the London Games is likely to lie in social media - still relatively new to the Games. "The big opportunity really is going to be in the online space, because there [the law] becomes a little bit more of a grey area, particularly in social media," says Alex Brownsell, news editor of Marketing magazine, "and that's where Locog are anticipating more guerilla marketing. It's harder to police and the legal influence over this kind of area is more hazy."
At the Beijing Games – where internet restrictions were also in place locally – there were around 100 million users of social media worldwide, but the organisers had no social media presence. For London 2012 there will be more than 2 billion, and the IOC, to its credit, is making heroic efforts at engagement.
"We are at a dawn of a new age of sharing and connecting," says Alex Huot, the IOC's Swiss-based head of social media, "and London 2012 will ignite the first conversational Olympic Games."
Can Games organisers police social media chatter? Twitter has already agreed to work with Locog in barring non-sponsors from buying promoted ads with hashtags like #London2012.
The organising committee has also put together a detailed social media and blogging policy for athletes, so that they don't accidentally fall foul of regulations - by Tweeting about a brand that isn't an Olympic sponsor, for example. (During "Games Period" - 18 July to 15 August - advertising rules become much stricter for athletes, banning all non-sponsor endorsements.) Like all attendees at any Olympic venue, there is an absolute bar on athletes uploading snatches of video or audio, which would contravene lucrative broadcasters' rights.
But will Locog really disqualify Usain Bolt if he Tweets about drinking Pepsi? (Coca Cola is the main softdrink sponsor.)
It's inconceivable, says Jordan. "As with many rules and regulations, some of the sanctions are very draconian, and rarely used. I do not believe there would be any great appetite for evoking any of these incredibly tough sanctions, and high-profile disqualifications of athletes — that's the last thing they would want."
"We don't police," says Huot, "but we are working closely with all the platforms to make sure that trademark and IP rights are respected and that we have a mechanism in place in case of infringements." He acknowledges, however, that moderating is a technical challenge.
Organisers have asked athletes to report any ambush activities on a dedicated website, OlympicGamesMonitoring.com. It is not accessible to unauthorised persons.
Locog stresses its approach will be "pragmatic" and "amicable" where possible, but even for ordinary ticket holders, the regulations are draconian if it chooses to assert them.
"On a very literal reading of the terms and conditions, there's certainly an argument that the IOC could run that you wouldn't be able to post pictures to Facebook," says Jordan. "I think what they are trying to avoid is any formal commercial exploitation of those images, but that's not what it says. And for that reason, it would appear that if you or I attended an event, we could only share our photos with our aunties around the kitchen table. Which seems a bizarre consequence."
Pressed for clarification on this point, Locog would only repeat its policy that images "can only be used for private purposes".
In such a controlled environment, says Brownsell, there will always be a danger for marketers that association with an event that is seen as overly commercialised or legalistic may be perceived as a drawback. He cites the example of Visa, which experienced some negative press when it was the only payment option offered when tickets were offered for sale.
Ultimately, however, there is a good reason for the restrictions, Brownsell stresses – as a shortfall in sponsorship would have to be made up from the public purse.
"Maybe Locog hasn't put across strongly enough the argument that these companies are paying for the Olympics, and if they weren't paying for it, we would be paying for it."

Banned during the Games: What the rules say
Athletes don't …
• Blog about your breakfast cereal or energy bar if it's not an official sponsor – in Games Period all endorsement is banned.
• Post video clips from inside the athletes' village to your blog or Youtube. No audio or video content from inside any Olympic venue can be uploaded to any site.
• Tweet "in the role of a journalist". Athletes "must not report on competition or comment on the activities of other participants".

Non-sponsor companies and businesses don't …
• Say: "Supporting our athletes at the 2012 Games!" or "Help us make it a Gold 2012!"
• Use images that suggest an assocation with the London Olympics.
•Offer tickets as part of a promotion.

Crowd members don't …
• Upload a clip of William and Kate tripping up the steps of the Olympic stadium to Youtube: "A Ticket Holder may not license, broadcast or publish video and/or sound recordings, including on social networking websites and the internet."
• Post your pictures to Facebook – this may fall under the same restriction.
• Take part in an ambush marketing stunt, "including, for the avoidance of doubt individual or group ambush marketing".

-Esther Addley

Source: www.guardian.co.uk

The British Olympic Association has called for the minimum ban for serious doping offences to be increased to four years and exclusion from at least one Olympic Games.

In a submission to the World Anti-Doping Agency, the BOA has also called for all national Olympic committees (NOCs) to be granted the right to impose additional sanctions on athletes who break doping rules.

The BOA’s proposals come as the organisation awaits the verdict of a challenge to its own life ban for drug cheats brought by Wada. Under a BOA bylaw anyone guilty of a serious doping offence punishable by a six-month ban or longer is banned for life from Team GB.

Wada has challenged the BOA bylaw on the grounds that it exceeds the universal sanction adopted by all Olympic sports and NOCs of a two-year ban for first offences.

The outcome of the case is expected to be released by the Court of Arbitration for Sport later this month, with most observers expecting the BOA to lose, clearing the way for athletes such as Dwayne Chambers and David Millar to compete in London.

Against that background, the BOA’s submission to Wada’s review of its code is an attempt to set the terms of the debate about the direction of anti-doping post-London.

Central to the submission is a call for NOCs and international federations to be able to impose additional penalties on top of a mandatory minimum four-year ban, which if adopted would allow the BOA’s life ban to be reinstalled even if it loses at CAS.

Elements of the BOA’s position are likely to find support within the IOC, which was forced to drop its own rule banning dopers from at least one Olympics last year following a challenge from American sprinter LaShawn Merritt.

As well as calling for longer bans the BOA is critical of Wada’s record on catching serious cheats, suggesting the focus on “end-user testing” is too reactive, and urging more intelligence-led operations.

“Too often Wada has failed to catch the serious doping cheats – which, to its credit, Wada acknowledges,” The BOA submits. “Now may be the time to consider at a more fundamental level the role, structure and function of Wada as a centralised body.

“The BOA believes that focusing on intelligence-based testing, targeting the source of supply and the entourage who influence athletes as well as investing in building athlete biological profiles throughout the year should be the priorities in the campaign against the drug cheats.

“End-user testing still has a valuable place in the overall fight but it is not the principal way to catch the serious offenders.”

The BOA’s position is backed by some of the most high-profile recent case history. Disgraced US sprinter Marion Jones never failed a drugs test and was only exposed after involvement of US law enforcement authorities.

Millar also never failed a test, but admitted his use of EPO following a raid on his home by French police investigating an alleged doping conspiracy.

The BOA also calls for a review of the athlete whereabouts system, under which they have to be available for an hour-a-day for testing, saying the current model makes even innocent athletes feel guilty.

“The effect is that too many athletes are treated, and feel, as if they are guilty before being proved innocent; yet often they are in the vanguard of the fight against cheating in sport. for making athletes feel guilty before they are proved innocent.”

The BOA also calls for a more consistent policy on social drugs, and urges WADA to examine the approach of UK governing bodies such as the Football Association which focus on rehabilitation in relation to non-performance enhancing social substances.

-Paul Kelso

Source: www.telegraph.co.uk

Jacques Rogge, president of the International Olympic Committee, has hailed the "legacy blueprint" laid down by the London Games before Wednesday's meeting with the prime minister, David Cameron, and its final inspection visit.
It was the legacy promises made by the London 2012 chairman, Lord Coe, in Singapore in 2005 that helped secure the Games, with the IOC particularly concerned to engage with a new generation.
In order to create continued competition among potential host cities, the IOC also recognises the need to prove that investing in an Olympics can be a driver of regeneration and leave a lasting legacy. Rogge said that London had delivered on its promises and created a new blueprint for future hosts.
"London has raised the bar on how to deliver a lasting legacy. We can already see tangible results in the remarkable regeneration of east London. This great historical city has created a legacy blueprint for future Games hosts," said Rogge.
Cameron said the opportunity to deliver on the myriad legacy promises made on behalf of the Games was the government's biggest challenge and the greatest opportunity.
"Legacy has been built into the DNA of London 2012. But by definition, of course, the true legacy of London 2012 lies in the future," he said. "Though much has been done, I am acutely aware that the drive to embed and secure the benefits of London 2012 is still to come. That is our biggest challenge. It's also our greatest opportunity."
The focus on legacy is part of a government drive to reframe the debate and highlight the benefits as justification for investing £9.3bn of public money in them at a time of austerity.
The government has been stung by criticism over areas of the promised legacy, most obviously in sports participation where a target introduced by Labour to use the Games to inspire one million more people to play more sport had to be dropped amid negligible progress, and will today publish a new 80-page document called Beyond 2012 as part of an attempt to redress the balance.
Cameron and the culture secretary, Jeremy Hunt, are expected to highlight the progress made in securing a lasting legacy for six of the eight permanent Olympic venues, despite the ongoing debate over the future of the iconic stadium.
Another recurring theme is the extent to which the Olympics have proved a boon to British business and acted as a calling card for the UK economy, as well as driving the regeneration of east London.
There has also been criticism of the decision to slash the dedicated school sport budget by more than half only 18 months before the Olympics.
But Hunt and the sports minister, Hugh Robertson, will counter it by pointing to the new School Games scheme backed by Sainsbury's – a network of inter and intra school sports competitions culminating in finals in the Olympic Park – and a reworked plan to encourage more grass-roots youth sport.
The IOC's co-ordination commission delegation, led by its chair, Denis Oswald, will start its final two-day inspection visit following the meeting at Downing Street, which will also be attended by Lord Coe.
It is the last of 10 visits to monitor London's progress that began in 2006 and, like those that preceded it, will largely consist of a series of in-depth updates on various aspects of the London 2012 preparation.
As well as the latest "Get Ahead of the Games" transport campaign to try to prepare businesses and the public for potential bottlenecks during the Games, the IOC will also be updated on the plans for the last phase of the sometimes controversial ticketing process.

-Owen Gibson

Source: www.guardian.co.uk