LONDON 2012: London Unveils Its Olympic Stadium

The Olympic Stadium for the Games in 2012 has been unveiled at a ceremony in the London Olympic Park. The 80,000-seat stadium will be the centre-piece of the 2012 Games venues and will host the Opening and Closing Ceremonies and athletics events. Once the Games are over, the arena will be converted into a 25,000-seat permanent stadium and will become a new home for athletics, combined with other sporting, community and educational uses.




Inspiring, Innovative and Sustainable
Commenting at the launch, the Chairman of the London 2012 Organising Committee (LOCOG), Seb Coe, said: “We talk a lot about milestones, but few will be more exciting than this, the unveiling of the Olympic Stadium, which will be the centre-piece of our Olympic Park. The stadium will stand for everything we talked about in the bid: it will be inspiring, innovative and sustainable – the theatre within which the Olympic Games and Paralympic Games will be played out and will leave behind top class sporting and community facilities after the Games.”




Aircraft Carriers and Submarines
The Olympic Delivery Authority (ODA) is working with the Team Stadium consortium to build the venue, but thanks to the strong progress already made by the ODA since it received the stadium site in July, construction work is expected to start two to three months early next year. Indeed, in the five months since the ODA started working on the area, 28 out of 33 buildings have already been demolished, and because ground levels vary across the site, some parts will have to be lowered by nine metres and others raised by five metres. This implies that over the next few months around 600,000 tonnes of soil will be taken away from the site to help create the construction platform for the stadium – the equivalent weight of around 27 aircraft carriers or 37 submarines.

LONDON 2012
London was elected as the host city for the Games of the XXX Olympiad on 6 July 2005 at the 117th IOC Session in Singapore. London eventually succeeded in the fourth round of voting, taking 54 votes from a possible 104. London faced stiff opposition during the vote from the other four candidate cities: Paris, New York, Moscow and Madrid. There will be 26 sports on the Olympic programme in London in 2012 and around 10,500 athletes.