London 2012 blog

Today I spoke to a group of major events managers to update them on our progress. It raised some interesting points about why the Games are such a unique proposition.

A case in point - our staff. We started with 50 people last July, and this week hired our 100th staff member. The team size will then double every year to 2012. By Games time we will have 3000 full time staff. Then as soon as the lights go out on the closing ceremony we need to start winding the company down.

Then there is the sheer scale of the event - among other things we will need 75,000 litres of milk, 200,000 chairs and 15,000km of toilet paper.

And this is just for the Games themselves, at the same time our colleagues at the ODA will be building a new community to last long after the Games have been and gone - among other things dredging more than 300km of river and building 10k of roads.

So how do you achieve such a mammoth task? By building the best possible team, learning from the IOC and other experts at events like today’s and by hitting all our deadlines.

It was great sharing our plans with these professional event managers who truly understand the scale and complexity of the project.