Pivotal: the lighting of the cauldron is the moment everyone is waiting for (Photo: AP)
Pressure is building on London Olympic Games organisers to keep the Olympic cauldron as energy efficient as possible after failing to deliver on recent ”green” promises.
Some of the bonus monies due to chief executive Paul Deighton, paid £480,000 last year, rely on having the Games classified as sustainable.
But offsetting carbon emissions, a bid promise, was scrapped two years ago and the Olympic torch biofuel idea fell by the wayside in April.
Reducing the carbon footprint has cost Locog an extra million pounds in offsetting costs and renewable targets will only be half of the 20 per cent target.
The announcement of the cauldron fuel is being closely watched by the green movement.
National interest
Downing Street is concerned about the escalating security costs eating into the contingency buffer of Locog’s £600m security budget, because its security numbers may double from 10,000 to 20,000 taking up an extra £150 million.
That equates to £15,000 for each security guard. But insiders say the extra guards are good news for the public because Locog is expanding the number of venue entry checkpoints to reduce queue times.
Locog is trying to get queue times down to around 20 minutes, but with sold out sessions for the morning heats at Olympic Park, hundreds of thousands of people will be wanting to enter around the same time.
3D or not 3D?
With the announcement this week that the London 2012 Olympics will be the first Games broadcast in 3D, the question remains whether the 25m square screens dotted around the country at the Olympic ”live” sites will showcase the groundbreaking technology.
Thousands of spectators would have to don the special glasses to view the screens and its pop-out action, but the decision rests not with sponsor Panasonic or the Olympic Broadcast Services, but with the BBC.
The BBC, while committed to showing some of the 10 days a day of available 3D footage, is not convinced the public are big fans of the product.
But the normal 2D coverage will feature many of those super-slow motion shots like quivering arrows and divers breaking the surface tension of the water, because of the latest technological advances with high speed cameras.
Commentary teams cut
Television stations around the world are scaling back on their commentary teams for the London 2012 Olympic Games, partly because Olympic Broadcast Services, with its 6,000 staff and 1,500 cameras, is providing pre-packaged products, including a half hour rolling Olympic news show with multiple language options.
Some networks in Hong Kong, Taiwan, New Zealand, Argentina, Brazil and Mexico are finding it cheaper to stay at home.
Rent a (young) crowd
It looks like Locog’s free Ticketshare scheme for schoolchildren, Tickets for Troops and former Olympians is largely skewed towards filling Olympic football matches and Paralympic seats.
Two-thirds of the 125,000 seats for schoolchildren are for football or the Paralympics.
Bizarrely almost 20 per cent of London schools didn’t sign up for the scheme, which offered free tickets to one in eight schoolchildren.
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