Subject: London 2012 Olympics and Paralympic Games
Lord Coe, Chairman, London Organising Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games: There are now just 955 days till the opening of the games. That's 988 days until the opening of the Paralympic Games, and our teams as Paul has just quite rightly said our teams at LOCOG are keenly aware of the challenges that we face, to stage two of the largest sporting events in the world.
If there is anything I guess I would like the committee to leave with before Christmas, it is the nature and scale, and sheer complexity of this project management. We open on the 27 July in 2012. We stage 26 simultaneous world championships, we take about two weeks working day and night to transfigure, to transform, London, from an Olympic into a Paralympic City, and then we do pretty much the same with 20 Paralympic Championships.
Our progress and our momentum has been to date extremely strong, and since winning the bid, as Paul has just said, we have raised nearly 600 million pounds in private funding, we have 25 domestic business partners in place. We continue to recruit a world class team, as the organisation bid time has grown from 70, to games time just over 2,000.
We have informed our preparations by our learning's from Beijing and next February from the Vancouver Games and we have focused are operational planning and delivery in over 50 venues across London and the UK.