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let the games begin .....

let the games begin .....

Olympic security is in disarray, but organisers are taking no chances with corporate deals...

Hundreds of uniformed Olympics officers will begin touring the country today enforcing sponsors' multimillion-pound marketing deals, in a highly organised mission that contrasts with the scramble to find enough staff to secure Olympic sites.

Almost 300 enforcement officers will be seen across the country checking firms to ensure they are not staging "ambush marketing" or illegally associating themselves with the Games at the expense of official sponsors such as Adidas, McDonald's, Coca-Cola and BP. The clampdown goes on while 3,500 soldiers on leave are brought in to bail out the security firm G4S which admitted it could not supply the numbers of security staff it had promised.

Yesterday, the Culture Secretary, Jeremy Hunt, refused to rule out that even more soldiers may be called upon to help with security, but dismissed the issue as merely a "hitch". However, as well as the regular Army, the Olympic "brand army" will start its work with a vengeance today.

Wearing purple caps and tops, the experts in trading and advertising working for the Olympic Delivery Authority (ODA) are heading the biggest brand protection operation staged in the UK. Under legislation specially introduced for the London Games, they have the right to enter shops and offices and bring court action with fines of up to £20,000.

Olympics organisers have warned businesses that during London 2012 their advertising should not include a list of banned words, including "gold", "silver" and "bronze", "summer", "sponsors" and "London".

Publicans have been advised that blackboards advertising live TV coverage must not refer to beer brands or brewers without an Olympics deal, while caterers and restaurateurs have been told not to advertise dishes that could be construed as having an association with the event.

At the 40 Olympics venues, 800 retailers have been banned from serving chips to avoid infringing fast-food rights secured by McDonald's.

Marina Palomba, for the McCann Worldgroup agency in London, described the rules as "the most draconian law in advance of an Olympic Games ever". The ODA and Locog (London Organising Committee of the Olympic Games) say the rules are necessary to protect brands.

"These rights are acquired by companies who invest millions of pounds to help support the staging of the Games," Locog said. "People who seek the same benefits for free – by engaging in ambush marketing or producing counterfeit goods – are effectively depriving the Games of revenue."

Some £1.4bn of the Games' £11.4bn budget comes from private sector sponsors. The International Olympic Committee's 11 global partners, including Coca-Cola, Visa and Proctor & Gamble, are contributing £700m while £700m comes from London 2012 partners, including Adidas, BT, EDF, and Lloyds TSB.

The scale of the brand enforcement squad is nonetheless likely to intensify criticism that the Olympics has become too corporate. Paul Jordan, an expert in brand protection at Bristows solicitors who advises firms on the rules, said they were almost certainly tougher than at previous Olympics. "No other brands would have people walking the streets being their eyes and ears, protecting their interests," he said.

A spokesman for the Olympic Delivery Authority, whose team of 286 enforcement officers have been seconded from 30 local councils, said it had a duty to ensure businesses were meeting the rules.

"We are using experienced local authority staff who currently enforce street trading and advertising legislation. They have all been fully trained," the spokesman said.

"Deliberate ambush offences will be dealt with using the full enforcement powers conferred on officers."

Britain Flooded With 'Brand Police' To Protect Sponsors

 

just wild about sport & the arts .....

from Crikey …..

Rundle: a gold medal in incompetence for Cameron govt

Guy Rundle writes from London:

LONDON OLYMPICS, OLYMPICS GAMES, SECURITY, UK GOVERNMENT

They've put surface-to-air missiles on the roof of apartment blocks, created special lanes for Olympic limousines and effectively told us not to use half the Underground system for the first half of August. But the one thing they can’t do, it seems, is run basic security.

Four days ago, private security firm G4S announced it would be unable to cover 3500 security positions of the 10,400 they had contracted to provide. The government announced the Army would fill the slots.

Many of those troops are coming back from Afghanistan, and would otherwise be on leave. Some of them are being made redundant, as part of the swingeing Defence cuts.

Subsequent reports revealed a litany of abject failure by the company, the largest security firm in the world. Recruitment was chaotic, haphazard and last-minute, with applicants given training and then not rostered on, given hotlines to ring to register - only to find there was no record of their existence - those with security clearances excluded, and those who failed them signed on.

Further bad news followed: G4S could not guarantee all the staff in public interface positions would be able to speak fluent English. Then whistleblowers started to come out of the woodwork, saying that elementary security procedures were being bypassed by under-trained staff.

G4S and the Cameron government tried to put a brave face on it, with the company's CEO Nick Buckles saying it had been "fully transparent" with the government at all times - that is, on the enormous stuff-up that had endangered the very occurrence of the Games.

The government for its part was desperate not to acknowledge the stuff-up at all costs, with culture secretary Jeremy Hunt saying the drafting in of the troops showed the government had a contingency plan "and it was working as intended".

Hunt - put on the spot during the Radio Four show Any Questions? - refused to apologise to the troops for ruining their leave, preferring to prattle on about how "willing they are to serve". It didn't go down well.

Two days into the crisis, David Cameron realised he had to be a little tougher and announced companies that failed to fulfil their contracts would be subject to penalty fees - Buckles had tried to claim the 50 million G4S would lose from sheer cost overruns was penalty enough.

The whole episode - which appears to be far from over - has been a triple disaster. It has exposed the authoritarian militarised security apparatus of the Olympics as little more than a sham, especially where a private company is concerned. It has given fresh ammunition to the notion that the Cameron/Clegg government is incompetent at the most basic functions.

Above all it has proved to be another blow against the idea renewed by the Cameron government that privatisation is a source of efficiency and savings. The Olympic debacle has occurred at the same time as the first announcements of privatisation of NHS services.

In Devon, children’s services will now be run by Virgin, because when it comes to your kids, what you really want is someone with the gravitas of Richard Branson taking care of business. Yet Virgin was far from the worst bidder - one other consortium included Serco who are, erm, part of G4S.

Nor is it just the health services. The police force in Lincolnshire is contracting out its back office services on a 200 million contract to a company called … oh look, it's G4S!

Yet, the Olympics disaster may well bring that process to a screaming halt. Late yesterday, it was revealed G4S had provided only 4000 staff, so further troops may be required. The Ministry of Defence has already announced the 17,000 troops assigned to the Olympics are starting to disrupt normal deployment and the basic business of defence.

Nevertheless, despite all these failures - and the strong possibility Buckles may be forced to resign - the government continued to defend G4S, whining that the problem was not with the company but with the failure of those it contracted to turn up for work.

Still, whatever goes wrong, we still have the surface-to-air missiles on the roof. The building they're located in houses the Australia Council's London studio - so, at last, something launched from there will have an impact. 

one is careless, two is a conspiracy...

AUSTRALIAN Olympic athletes and officials were taken on a three-hour "Monopoly tour" of London after a bus chartered by Games organisers, with a lost driver behind the wheel, took three hours to travel from Heathrow airport to the Olympic village.

Beijing gold medallist Elise Rechichi was among the contingent of Australian sailors on the vehicle that was two hours late to collect the party, then drove around for hours on what should have been a 45-minute trip, before the driver admitted the East London Games village had not been entered into the GPS navigation system.



Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/olympics/news-london-2012/lost-driver-takes-athletes-on--monopoly-tour-20120717-226v5.html#ixzz20pKvY9hN

 

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A new track record was set 
today in London, when a bus carrying weary US athletes from Heathrow airport  to the Olympic Village took four hours – twice as long as the world record for the Marathon, a similar distance.

Kerron Clement, a Olympic champion hurdler, was on board the Spanish-made bus. “We’ve been lost on the road for 4hrs,” he tweeted plaintively as the hapless bus driver tried to find his way to Stratford. “Athletes are sleepy, hungry and need to pee … Not a good first impression London.”

As sportsmen and women took almost as long to make their way across the capital as they had to fly halfway around the world, the host city began shakily in the most punishing 2012 event of all: the Olympic image hurdles.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/bus-carrying-weary-us-athletes-from-heathrow-takes-four-hours-to-reach-olympic-village-as-driver-gets-lost-in-traffic-7946693.html

but it's just a game .....

'A humiliating shambles': the Olympics security shortfall …

The prelude to the Games has been overshadowed by the admission by G4S that it would not be able to provide the promised number of security personnel, forcing the army to provide an extra 3,500 soldiers, some just back from the war in Afghanistan.

circus economics .....

Who can blame G4S, asks Simon Jenkins in The Guardian.

"They have done what everyone has done with a nose in this trough." Offered stupid amounts of cash for minimal responsibility, they took the money and ran.

"London is now being given a taste of what an unaccountable world government might be like": an Orwellian realm of Zil lanes, G4S and Locog inspectors roaming the streets, tearing down Pepsi ads.

Locog [the London Organising Committee of the Olympic Games] also enjoys unlimited access to the British exchequer, with a budget ballooning from £3bn to £9bn.

"Not since William of Orange arrived with his Dutch army in 1688 has London's government been surrendered so completely to an alien power." But modern cities have no future as theme parks. Trying to allot 100 miles of crowded roads to Olympic VIPs and telling citizens to stay away from work for a month is crazy.

"Circus economics" did no good for Rome – nor will it for London.

London Has Surrendered To The Alien Power Locog