I’m not much of a chap for awards. Don’t get me wrong – winning a swimming free pass, aged 11, was quite a moment. Coming second in a stilt walking marathon two years later was probably another life defining punctuation. In more recent years I’ve consoled myself with the profound belief that jobs like mine are all about creating an environment in which others can excel and pick up the gongs.
However in this week’s LOCOG in-house review of the year, imagine my astonishment when I was feted as “Blogger of the Year”! Let me tell you it ranks amongst...
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The 2012 Editor, 21 December 2007
Watch a video showing an update on the milestones to the Beijing 2008 Games.
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The 2012 Editor, 21 December 2007
Watch a video showing some of London 2012's key achivements in 2007.
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Wow, I can’t believe its all coming to an end. The past three months has been an incredible learning experience for me. I’ve done lots, learnt lots and still learning and doing lots.
My first placement in Culture, Ceremonies & Education (CCE), is one I won’t ever forget. The team is fantastic, always helping each other- you couldn’t ask for a better set of people to work with. Everyone’s so caring, but yet so passionate about their roles.
The past three months have been nothing but pure memorable/tremendous moments for me. On December the 6th was the Educational Briefing. This...
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Last week I attended the opening of a new station from our delivery partner, Docklands Light Railway (DLR), at Langdon Park. Located between the All Saints and Devons Road stations, this £7.5 million facility will give thousands of local people in Tower Hamlets better connectivity to London’s public transport system. Just 10 minutes from Stratford Regional Station, Langdon Park will also provide spectators with a great link to the action at the Olympic Park in 2012.
Langdon Park station:
The local community helped design the station and the school next door hosted the opening ceremony. Mayors, councillors, funders and the...
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Last week I was pleased to be invited to be a guest judge at the London School of Economics. Students studying for a Masters in Human Resources had been set a group task of devising a HR strategy for the London 2012 Games and they had to present their strategy to the group.
Listening to the presentations it was clear that a great deal of research, thinking and rehearsing had gone into their work and that the six teams were all eager to do well - particularly as the prizes were chocolates!
I was extremely impressed with the hard work the students had...
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Today marks 100 days since I joined the Olympic Delivery Authority and what a 100 days it has been.
When I joined the ODA as Chairman in September this year the work on the Olympic Park was just beginning to accelerate - almost a third of the Olympic Park had been cleared, with over 40 buildings demolished.
100 days later and I have seen significant progress made on site – demolition work is well over the halfway stage and the clean up of the site well underway, with previously contaminated ground being cleaned and reused on site.
We have also hit other key...
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I started working at LOCOG a month ago as project manager on ‘Welcoming the World’. I know, it sounds like a big responsibility.
While it’s inspired by a big idea - of showcasing the uniqueness of East London to the rest of the world - it’s actually a film and photography project involving 20 schools in the five Host Boroughs of Greenwich, Hackney, Newham, Tower Hamlets and Waltham Forest.
Welcoming the World is the first education project we’re launching, to coincide with the start of the Cultural Olympiad in 2008. At the end of the Beijing Olympic Games and Paralympic...
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Yesterday I saw more evidence yesterday of people's dedication to helping people achieve their dreams on my tour of the West Midlands - part of London 2012's Nations and Regions programme.
I opened a new athletics track at Aldersley Leisure Village, where I won my first AAA Youth Championship.
I also spoke at a sports participation conference in Telford, and visited Sundorne school in Shrewsbury - a specialist sports college who are working on a range of initiatives to encourage their students to both participate in sport and to have healthy meals at school.
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Last week children from the Waterden Crescent Travellers’ community were the first to attend the Olympic Delivery Authority’s new health and safety initiative - ‘Don’t Go There!’ - a play and workshop about staying safe near construction sites.
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The London 2012 Education briefing last Thursday was an amazing experience to be involved in, not least from an artwork perspective. It was great to see how things developed from our initial meeting with the Education team at London 2012 through to the actual day.
The presentation of the artwork looked fantastic. And hearing the speakers deliver their presentations was very insightful - particularly the Youth Ambassador, Jasmine Scott who at 17 can certainly entrance a room and capture her audience. She did a fantastic job and I wondered, as I stood listening, if maybe one day she'll be Prime Minister!!
The buzz of...
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Hi, I’m Tom ‘Danger’ Dickinson. I’m a Graphic Design student . I’m in the final year of my degree now and I’m currently working on my entries for next years D and AD and YCN design competitions. It’s stressful stuff, but provides a good distraction from writing my dissertation. I’m particularly interested in motion graphics and filmmaking.
I was asked to take part in an exhibition and showcase of LOCOG’s new education initiative for young people. I received a mysterious message to collect a design brief from the 22nd floor of a skyscraper in Canary Wharf. Needless to say, this was...
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Each year, as part of the BBC Sports Personality of the Year Awards, the BBC runs a competition to find a Sports Unsung Hero. It gave me great pleasure to be an ambassador for the Unsung Hero award this year. When I was asked who my own personal Unsung Hero is, I replied my father - he navigated me through the early years and nurtured my teenage talent from junior domestic successes through to international competition and ultimately, two Olympic Games and world records.
Margaret Simons, the founder of Bardwell Football Club in Bicester, Oxfordshire, was picked from 15 regional winners as...
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The chance to visit the newly reopened London Transport Museum in Covent Garden powerfully reminded me just how public transport has helped shape the city of London and indeed our transport plans for the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games.
It was the Victorians who sorted out the fundamentals. Firstly, it was the national railway network, followed by specific London transport modes, such as middle-class horse buses, working-class horse trams and underground railways.
The Edwardians then invested in the deeper level tube lines, which 100 years on, have given us a 408km-long tube network that serves 275 stations! The tube will...
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Yesterday, the LOCOG Education team hosted a briefing for the Education sector. This was our first chance to share our plans for the London 2012 Education Programme and to explain what we’ve been doing for the last few months.
We were joined at the Vinyl Factory Gallery in Soho by an audience including Government, sponsors and members of the Olympic and Paralympic Families. The venue had been dressed by students from the London College of Fashion and the Chelsea College of Art and Design - they spent the few weeks leading up to the event coming up with ideas for how they...
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I did a lot of sport in my childhood, but was always drawn to acting. That was my real passion and my only dream. My life was changed greatly with a passage to Moscow at the age of fourteen. From acting, I moved on to fashion, which has now led me to London – a youthful and vibrant capital city.
I have just completed a BA in Fashion Design and Technology at the University of the Arts London, and my institution became my link to the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games, where I worked on a design project for the education...
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We defined the 2012 vision with young people at the very outset. We wanted to demonstrate that young people are at the very essence of the Games. We invited 30 young people from the five Host Boroughs to Singapore in 2005 not only to demonstrate our commitment to involving children and young people in 2012 but also because we hoped that it would have a positive impact on them and would help to raise their aspirations as individuals, opening their eyes to the possible opportunities out there for them. We trusted them to represent what is great about London and the UK. This...
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Our ambition is for London 2012 to use the power of the Games to inspire change by delivering a memorable Games that provide experiences of a lifetime, capturing the imagination of young people all over the world, and by creating physical, social and sporting legacies that meet the long term needs of people and their communities.
We want to use education and learning to maximise children’s and young peoples engagement, with the London 2012 Games, inspiring them and helping them to fulfill their potential.
When considering how we are going to achieve this we kept coming back to the Olympic and Paralympic...
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The 2012 Editor, 6 December 2007
Quatchi, one of the Vancouver 2012 mascots, made his first visit to London this week - first stop, London 2012 HQ.
He caught up on all the latest London 2012 news...
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The 2012 Editor, 4 December 2007
Last week London 2012 launched its Sustainability Plan - a strategy to ensure that the 2012 Games represent environmental as well as sporting excellence. Find out more in our sustainability video.
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