Chef de Mission
We are into the last 80 days and the London Organising Committee, New Zealand Oympic Committee, sports and athletes are very focused on the job at hand. The operations team and I are middle of our final round of meetings with the sports ensuring that all preparations and plans are in place to receive athletes into the Olympic Team when they arrive in London. Athletes continue to be selected with 84 now confirmed.
A lot has been happening in the last month with the completion the last of the London workshops in Wellington on the 7th March. These workshops gave us a chance to interact with athletes and support staff and for all of us to focus our thinking as the 100 day out mark looms on the 18th April. We travelled from Invercargill, Auckland, Cambridge and Wellington to have these workshops with athletes. It provided us with the opportunity to size athletes for uniforms, collect accreditation data and have photographs taken.
We’re at 157 days to go and momentum continues to build.
Our focus at the moment is getting out to all the athletes likely to make the team to London and giving them an idea of just what the London Olympic Games will be like.
We kicked off a series of workshops in Invercargill with the cycling team before heading up to Auckland and then down to Cambridge and Wellington over the next few weeks.
During my recent site visit in December 2011 to London I had the chance to talk to Seb Coe, Chairman of the London Organising Committee. He noted that when he was preparing for his Olympic competition he knew with 7 months to go all the details of the training sessions he had between then and his 1st race. You get the same feeling of preparedness when you meet with all areas of his organisation, of all the Organising Committees I have worked with London gives me the most confidence that they will deliver what they say they will. They will deliver a great games.
Kia ora, I head to London at the end of November for a conference bringing together all Oceania countries who will be competing at the Olympics next year.
It is part of the process of ensuring we have a total understanding of the environment athletes will face during the 2012 Summer Olympics and that we continue to share with the high performance managers of all sports. From both our points of view we want no surprises.