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The 2012 Summer Olympics venues are mostly located in the host city of London, though some other events require facilities located elsewhere. Since the successful bid for the 2012 Summer Olympics, some details have changed, with ongoing developments and announcements taking place.

[edit] Sporting venues

The 2012 Olympics will use a mixture of newly built venues, existing facilities, and temporary facilities, some of them in well known locations such as Hyde Park and Horse Guards Parade. In the wake of the problems that plagued the Millennium Dome, the intention is that there will be no white elephants after the games. Some of the new facilities will be reused in their Olympic form, while others will be reduced in size and several will be relocated elsewhere in the UK. The plans will contribute to the regeneration of Stratford in east London which will be the site of the Olympic Park, and of the neighbouring Lower Lea Valley.

The majority of venues have been divided into three zones within Greater London: the Olympic Zone, the River Zone and the Central Zone. In addition to these are those venues that, by necessity, are outside the boundaries of Greater London.

The International Olympic Committee (IOC) noted that at the time of the bid further negotiations were necessary to ensure the use of the Old Trafford and Villa Park football stadia. The need for compulsory purchase orders was also highlighted as a possible problem for the Olympic Park, but did not expect this to cause any "undue delay to construction schedules".

[edit] Olympic Zone

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The Olympic Zone will encompass all of the facilities within the 500 acre (2 km²) Olympic Park in Stratford. This park will be developed on existing waste and industrial land, at grid reference TQ379849, and will be seven minutes by Olympic Javelin train from central London. The park will contain:

• The Olympic Stadium, which will host the track and field athletics events as well as the opening and closing ceremonies with a planned capacity of 80,000.
• The Aquatics Centre, which will host diving, swimming, synchronised swimming and water polo and will have a spectator capacity of 17,500 for swimming and diving.
• The London Velopark, which will include a 6,000 seat indoor velodrome for track cycling and a 6,000 seat outdoor BMX racing track.
• The Olympic Hockey Centre, with 15,000 and 5,000 seat arenas, which will host hockey.
• Two indoor arenas:
  • Basketball Arena - 12,000 capacity for basketball and handball semi-finals and final
  • Handball Arena - 6,000-7,000 capacity for handball prelims and quarter finals and modern pentathlon shooting and fencing
• The Olympic Village, with accommodation for all athletes and team officials (some 17,320 beds in total). After the games the village will become a district of the Stratford City development, a multi-billion pound development project on the former railway goods yard to the east of the Olympic Park. (Accredited technical officials — referees, umpires, etc. — will be housed in hotel space in London Docklands).
• The Olympic Press and Broadcast Centres.
• A tennis training centre.

The construction of the Olympic Park itself commenced in 2006, with Murphy Group awarded the contract to remove the powerlines which crossed the site and relocate these into a tunnel across the Olympic Park site. Civils companies Morrisons and Nuttalls were appointed to undertake the demolition and land re-mediation works, under the project management of WS Atkins. The pace of this speeded up with the closure of the roads crossing the Olympic Park in June 2007. The construction phase of the Olympic Park is being managed by CLM, a consortium comprising CH2M Hill, Laing O'Rourke and Mace. This consortium is officially titled Delivery Partner, ODA. The earliest construction of venues commences in April 2008 with the start of main build on the Olympic Stadium by McAlpine, with the nearby energy centre to be constructed by EDF Energy. Work on the Aquatics centre is due to commence by the end of 2008. During construction phase, the workforce on-site is expected to peak at 9,000 operatives.

[edit] River Zone

The O₂ will be a venue for gymnastics and basketball.

The River Zone will feature five main venues in the Thames Gateway area straddling the River Thames:

• The ExCeL Exhibition Centre, for boxing, fencing, judo, table tennis, taekwondo, weightlifting, and wrestling. Four separate arenas will be used with capacities between 6,000 and 10,000.
• The O₂ arena in The O₂ (formerly the Millennium Dome), for artistic gymnastics, trampolining, and the basketball finals. The O₂ will be officially known as North Greenwich Arena 1, due to IOC sponsorship regulations.
• Greenwich Park, for equestrianism.
• Temporary ranges at the Royal Artillery Barracks, for shooting.

[edit] Central Zone

Wembley Stadium, the most expensive stadium ever built,^[1] will be a venue for football.

The Central Zone will be formed out of all the remaining venues within Greater London. They are quite widely spread across central and West London:

Wimbledon will be a venue for tennis.

• Wembley Stadium for the football finals (90,000).
• Wembley Arena for badminton and rhythmic gymnastics.
• The All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club at Wimbledon for tennis.
• Lord's Cricket Ground for archery.
• Regent's Park for road cycling. The park was also the proposed venue for the dropped baseball and softball events.
• Horse Guards Parade for beach volleyball.
• Hyde Park for the triathlon.
• Earls Court for the volleyball.

The 2012 Olympic Marathon Course will circuit much of the Central Zone, starting at Tower Bridge, before heading to a finish at the Olympic Stadium in the Olympic Zone.^[2]

[edit] Outside Greater London

Portland Harbour at Weymouth and Portland National Sailing Academy will be a host sailing events.

The Millennium Stadium in Cardiff will partly host football.

Three of the venues will be just outside Greater London:

• Broxbourne, Hertfordshire, for canoe/kayak slalom
• Dorney Lake, Buckinghamshire, owned privately by Eton College, for rowing and canoe/kayak flatwater.
• The mountain biking is to be located at Hadleigh Country Park in Essex,^[3] after the original proposed venue, Weald Country Park (also in Essex), was deemed insufficiently challenging for elite mountain biking.^[4]

The Weymouth and Portland National Sailing Academy, in Portland Harbour, Dorset on the south coast of England, will be used for the sailing events. It is around 120 miles (192 km) from central London.

[edit] Football stadia

The earlier stages of the football competition will be played at football stadia around the United Kingdom including:^[5]

• Hampden Park in Glasgow
• Millennium Stadium in Cardiff
• Old Trafford in Manchester
• St James' Park in Newcastle
• National Football Stadium in Belfast^[6]

[edit] The Olympic village

• The village will have 17,320 beds and provide each athlete with 16m² floor space.
• There will be 3,300 apartments
• Each apartment will have a TV, internet access, and a private courtyard.
• The dining hall will cater for 5,500 athletes at a time.

Difficulties experienced by developers Lend Lease^[7] in raising funds for the village (the single largest project in the 2012 scheme) resulted in the scale of the village being reduced by "almost 25%"^[8]. This was achieved predominantly by providing accommodation for London-based athletes only. Those competing in events outside London were to be housed elsewhere. Following the athletes' experiences in Beijing 2008 (and in particular through comments concerning athletes' welfare by International Olympic Committee President Jacques Rogge) this compromise was to be reconsidered whilst pressure built for the finance deal to be resolved^[9].

Robert Bird Group, consulting structural engineers for 4 plots of the athletes village, designed the concrete structural scheme for the first four buildings under construction. They utilized post tensioned slabs for an economic design.

[edit] Transport and infrastructure

A London Underground train decorated to promote London's Olympic bid – this coincided with plans for investment in the city's public transport network

Public transport, an aspect of the bid which scored poorly in the IOC's initial evaluation, will see numerous improvements, including the expansion of the East London Line, upgrades to the Docklands Light Railway and the North London Line, and the new "Olympic Javelin" service. It is almost impossible to assess how many of the proposed improvements would have happened in any case. The games were won without a commitment to deliver Crossrail by 2012. This is the largest transport project proposed for London, and it was widely assumed in the early stages of the bidding process that the games could not be won without a guarantee that it would be completed before the games.

During the games 80% of athletes will be within 20 minutes of their events and 97% will be within 30 minutes of their events. Together, all the planned heavy rail, light rail, and underground services (excluding Crossrail) are expected to deliver around 240 trains every hour.^[10]

[edit] Further details

• 93% of training venues are to be within 30 minutes of the athletes' village.
• The aim is for 90% of venues to be served by three or more forms of public transport.
• There will be two major park and ride sites off the M25 with a combined capacity of 12,000 cars, within 25 minutes of the Olympic Park.
• There are 9,000 planned park and ride spaces to be made available at Ebbsfleet where spectators can board a 10-minute javelin service to the Olympic Park. This is the same station where continental spectators travelling by Eurostar will join the Olympic Javelin to the Olympic Park.
• It is predicted that on event days 78% of spectators are likely to travel from within London and 22% from the rest of the UK and Europe.
• Organisers estimate 80% of visitors and staff of the Games will use rail services to reach the Olympic Park.
• Low or no-emission vehicles will be used to transport Olympic athletes and officials.

[edit] Changes to the original bid

Regent's Park was planned to host the softball and baseball events, but the IOC chose not to run those events.

Windsor Park in Belfast, Northern Ireland, was included as a football venue in the IOC questionnaire submitted in 2004, but excluded in the final candidature file.

On 7 June 2006, a revised masterplan for the Olympic Park was announced. The most major change was the relocation of the volleyball events from a new Olympic Arena to the existing venue of Earls Court, which is several miles to the west. The revision also involved the re-organisation of the park shuffling the Basketball, Cycling, Fencing, Tennis and Hockey venues in addition to the Press and Broadcast Centre. This move was designed to remove the need for the relocation of 80 businesses and to provide a more coherent legacy for the sporting venues.

At least two of the venues to be developed outside central London have been relocated from the original bid sites. The Broxbourne canoe venue was marginally re-sited following the discovery (in October 2007) that the proposed Spitalbrook site was contaminated,^[11] while in February 2008 the Weald Country Park was deemed insufficiently challenging for elite mountain biking.^[4] It was announced in August 2008 that the revised venue would be at Hadleigh Country Park, also in Essex.^[3]

In August 2009, Villa Park was withdrawn from the list of venues for the football competition, due to uncertainty over Aston Villa's redevelopment plans for the stadium.^[12]

[edit] References

[edit] External links

• View the Olympic Park on Google Maps (photographed in 2005)