Here is the official olympic quiz that I have found on london2012.com. This has given me inspiration to create an olympic welcome pack and I could base the information inside the pack on these smile questions and facts giving and overall overview of the olympics throughout the years. I will be analysing this and using it thoroughly throughout the research process.

As I research more and more into the olympics and learn more about both the Ancient olympics in comparison to modern day olympics I am beginning to run through idea's for a final solution or product. Of course, this is not final at this stage but I am feeling very organised so far with strict routine and timelines to help me plan my time that I think it will benefit my future work towards the brief if I begin to think about an outcome as I research. 


My initial thoughts are to create a welcome pack for people whoa re going to visit the London 2012 olympics. This would include guides to London, olympic tickets, underground tickets, a guide to the olympic games with a small element of the history behind it and popular/successful sports, as well as vouchers etc that will fill out the pack. 


I have not yet begun to think about colour schemes, and initial designs never mind final designs etc however this will most probably occur after I have undergone further research and received my own olympic pack through the post before my own visit to London in 1 weeks time. 


Here is a list of 10 solutions that I have considered before refining my thoughts:


- iPhone App to show events and medal winners etc
- Create a logo and branding design for the Rio de Janeiro 2016 olympic games
- Posters to advertise potential olympic gold GB games and places where you can watch them in and around Leeds
- A London olympic guide that will suggest places to visit whilst in and around London (tourist maps etc)
- Children pop-up book that educates about the olympic games and sports.
- Branding for a 'get children sporty' campaign sponsored by the Olympic games to increased activity in young children.
- A London Olympic welcome pack, using the current logo etc to create a pack that includes a miniature pop-up book of places to visit in and around london, tickets for the games, a design for underground tickets etc, all inside a pack/box.
- Board game based on the olympics 
- Sportswear branding for olympic clothing
- Series of Posters to advertise the Rio de Janeiro Olympic games in 2016.

I have now decided to help me focus my research I should reflect back on why I chose the olympics as my topic to research in detail. Here I will list 5 reasons that I considered before choosing my final topic.

1) It is a current topic of conversation with the olympics being held in London this Summer.

2) I have tickets to see the olympics so will be able to reflect and input a lot more personal opinions and experiences into my research.

3) The olympic 2012 branding was not to my personal taste and something which I have always wanted to experiment with and recreate.

4) The options for a final product are so varied and the topic gave me a wider variety of outcomes.

5) There is a wide target audience to consider which would create a challenge for me (As broad as young children to the elderly)

Jumping Through Hoops

When London threw its name into the hat for the 2012 Olympics, many had doubts. Not former sport minister Tessa Jowell. Interviewing Tony Blair, Ken Livingstone, and others Jowell recruited to her cause, Michael Joseph Gross details the grueling, often farcical campaign that won the city its prize—plus a $14.5 billion tab.

BY GERRY PENNY/EPA/LANDOV; BY JEFF GROSS/GETTY IMAGES (INSET).

RACE TO THE FINISH The $150 million Velodrome is one of the few Olympic projects completed within budget.

On July 5, 2005, the mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, took up his pen to make official his city’s agreement with the International Olympic Committee. The 2012 Olympics had not yet been awarded to London—it would be, the following day—but the I.O.C. insists that candidate cities sign an official Olympic contract before the vote is taken, while all the leverage remains on the committee’s side. The contract is an epic masterpiece of micro-management. Its supporting materials, a set of 33 “Technical Manuals,” take up more than four feet of bookshelf space.

As Livingstone prepared to sign, he paused for a moment. Then he looked up at the I.O.C.’s executive director, Gilbert Felli, who was standing by his side, and said, “My lawyers advised me not to sign this contract. But I don’t suppose I’ve got any choice, have I?”

“No,” Felli answered, “you haven’t, really.”

Livingstone told me later that he had just been joking, but second thoughts would have been understandable. The full stipulations of the Olympic contract, which were made public in December 2010 by an East London activist and researcher named Paul Charman, following two years of Freedom of Information requests, contain tens of thousands of binding commitments. To comply with its terms, London must designate 250 miles of dedicated traffic lanes for the exclusive use of athletes and “the Olympic Family,” including I.O.C. members, honorary members, and “such other persons as may be designated by the IOC.” (These traffic lanes are sometimes called “Zil lanes,” alluding to the Soviet-era express lanes in Moscow reserved for the politburo’s favorite limousines.) Members of the Olympic Family must also have at their disposal at least 500 air-conditioned limousines with chauffeurs wearing uniforms and caps. London must set aside, and pay for, 40,000 hotel rooms, including 1,800 four- and five-star rooms for the I.O.C. and its associates, for the entire period of the Games. London must cede to the I.O.C. the rights to all intellectual property relating to the Games, including the international trademark on the phrase “London 2012.” Although mail service and the issuance of currency are among any nation’s sovereign rights, the contract requires the British government to obtain the I.O.C.’s “prior written approval” for virtually any symbolic commemoration of the Games, including Olympic-themed postage stamps, coins, and banknotes.

In the beginning, almost everyone agreed that it would be a terrible idea for London to host the 2012 Olympic Games. In 2002, with the next

year’s 2012 bid-deadline looming, the United Kingdom’s minister for culture, media, and sport, Tessa Jowell, received a one-page memo from an aide who argued strongly against it. If London lost, the country would be humiliated. (Paris, which had lost its last two bids to host the Games, was favored to win for 2012.) If London succeeded, the costs would outweigh the benefits and divert funding from other priorities.

But Jowell was coming off a happy summer. She had helped coordinate the Commonwealth Games (a kind of mini-Olympics for Britain’s former colonies) and also the Queen’s Golden Jubilee. Both were so successful that, as she recalled when I sat down with her in London, “when I got this advice, I thought, Hmm, I’m not sure that we’re just going to say that we can’t bid to host the Olympics. Look what we’ve just done.”

She arranged a series of one-on-one meetings with the other 22 members of Prime Minister Tony Blair’s Cabinet. They were, she recalled, “profoundly skeptical and hostile,” and indeed unanimous in their opposition. They feared a repeat of the swelling budgets and poor management that turned the building of the Millennium Dome into a public-relations fiasco. Jowell said that Gordon Brown, Blair’s chancellor of the Exchequer, told her, “We’re not going to be able to build schools or hospitals if you do these Olympic Games.” (Brown declined to be interviewed for this story.) When she hired economists to conduct a full-scale feasibility study, they too shot her down. “The quantifiable evidence to support each of the perceived benefits for mega-events is weak,” the study concluded. “They appear to be more about celebration than economic return.”

Of the cities that have hosted the Olympics in the past 30 years, Barcelona is one of the few for which the Games created an unambiguously positive economic legacy. The 1992 Summer Games revitalized the city’s waterfront, which has improved the quality of life for everyone there and Barcelona has been a magnet for tourists ever since. Jowell made a trip to Spain to see what the Games had done for the city, and she returned home believing the Olympics could have a similar effect on run-down East London neighborhoods such as Stratford and Hackney. She made that pitch to Ken Livingstone, who has less than zero interest in sports. (“I once went to a cricket match, in 1972, and fell asleep,” he told me.) Livingstone saw the bid—whether London won or lost—as a way to get money for East London infrastructure that might otherwise take decades to secure.

Most important, Jowell needed to persuade Prime Minister Tony Blair, whom she had known for 15 years, and for whom, she had once declared, she would “jump under a bus.” One of Blair’s biggest questions about the bid for 2012 concerned not economics but public image. He did not want to lose face to French president Jacques Chirac by entering a contest that Paris was bound to win.

So, in January 2003, Jowell made a special trip to the I.O.C.’s immaculate white-marble and glass headquarters on a grassy hill by Lake Geneva, in Lausanne, Switzerland. She went there to ask the committee’s dour and sphinx-like president, the Belgian count Jacques Rogge, an orthopedic surgeon and former Olympic yachtsman, whether London would be entering a fair race. Rogge told her what Blair wanted to hear.

With this news—and with a relatively modest budget estimate for the Games of $3.9 billion, which was to be drawn not from the national treasury but from the National Lottery and London’s council taxpayers—Jowell had enough leverage to persuade the majority of the Cabinet, in February, to give the go-ahead. To be sure, there was worry that the budget estimate was a complete fantasy. Blair himself remained hesitant. According to some accounts, he thought it would be unseemly to announce an Olympic bid just as Britain was preparing to join the United States in an invasion of Iraq. Asked about this in a telephone interview, Blair more or less confirmed that assessment. “You wouldn’t want literally at the moment you were going into battle to be talking about bits of the Olympics,” he said.

In early May, after two months of fighting in Iraq, President George W. Bush gave his “Mission Accomplished” speech, announcing that major combat operations were over. For the Olympic campaign, the speech could not have come at a better time: the deadline for applications to host the 2012 Games was nearing. On May 15, Jowell put on a new suit from Liberty, purchased specially for the occasion, and set out for a private meeting with the prime minister. Jowell, who is short, with a broad, determined face, rehearsed her argument all the way to No. 10 Downing Street, where she was shown to the veranda outside the Cabinet Room. The wisteria was in full bloom. According to Jowell, Blair said, “Look, this is very difficult, and I don’t know if we can win it—there are too many uncertainties.” Plus, he didn’t want to have another fight with Gordon Brown.

Information sourced from Vanity Fair

The 1916 Games were cancelled due to World War I and the 1940 and 1944 Games were cancelled due to World War II. 

The 1940 Olympic Games Was Not Held

The 1940 Olympic Games were originally scheduled to be held in Tokyo, Japan, but several countries planned to boycott the Games there because Japan was waging an aggressive war in Asia and then Japan itself decided the Games would be a distraction to their military goals. 


The Games were then rescheduled to be held in Helsinki, Finland, but the start of World War II in 1939 caused the Games to be cancelled.

Here is a list of the past 8 hosting cities of the Olympic games, this years current olympic games city and the future 2016 olympic games hosting city. 


1980 - Moscow, USSR (now Russia)
1984 - Los Angeles, US
1988 - Seoul, South Korea
1992 - Barcelona, Spain
1996 - Atlanta - US
2000 - Sydney, Australia
2004 - Athens, Greece
2008 - Beijing, China
2012 - London, UK
2016 - Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Today is quite as a special day, not only in Great Britain but also linked to my project as it is the official opening of the London 2012 Olympics, hosted in our own country. In the lead up to today I have been watching documentaries on BBC that have helped me to understand the opinions and feelings of athletes competing in order to gain primary research. 


I have watched both 'London 2012: Victoria Pendleton' and 'London 2012: Tom Daley', these are two very different athletes, one a teenager younger than myself and one a grown adult with very different experiences of different sports but both talked about how their homelike can affect training. 


Watching these was very engaging and emotional whilst at the same time allowed me to gain knowledge about the posts and view the olympics not only from the view of spectators but also from the view of the participants and how their lives are affected. Here are some things that I used to expand my knowledge after the documentaries we're broadcast:

London 2012: Victoria Pendleton feels 'trapped' by her success

PENDLETON ON THE BBC

• Wednesday 18 July at 21:00 BST on BBC One: Victoria Pendleton: Cycling's Golden Girl

Victoria Pendleton says she sometimes feels "trapped" by her success as she targets more Olympic gold in London.

Britain's greatest female track cyclist is tipped to retain her sprint title when the Games begin later this month.

But in a BBC One documentary to be aired on Wednesday, the multiple world champion says she can struggle with the huge expectation on her.

"My success has got so great, it's like I'm trapped, almost, within it," said Pendleton.

Pendleton, 31, started grass track cycling at the age of nine and has gone on to win one Olympic gold and nine world titles. She plans to retire after London 2012.

"I compete in a sport on an individual basis but I have never done it for me," she said. "I was always cycling for my dad. Then the coaches got bigger and my results got better.

"Suddenly the responsibility grows and I'm doing it for somebody else, I'm doing it for a programme, I'm doing it for the country, I'm doing it for, like, everybody."

In 'Victoria Pendleton: Cycling's Golden Girl', she also revealed that the day she won Olympic gold in Beijing was the "saddest" of her life.

Just hours after her victory, her relationship with Scott Gardner, a key member of her support team, became public knowledge, causing resentment amongst some members of British Cycling.

"Winning the gold medal should have been the happiest day of my entire life and it just wasn't," said Pendleton.

"It felt like the saddest day of my life.

"Everyone was so angry with us, that Scott and I had fallen in love, because it was so unprofessional and we were a disgrace and had betrayed everybody."

Gardner, now her fiance, was initially banished from British Cycling but continued to work with Pendleton.

However, the Australian was eventually reinstated in an effort to reverse Pendleton's dipping fortunes.

"Scott having to leave the team and everything he's worked for with us was a really huge deal," said Pendleton.

"I think I will be forever in his debt.

"He has given up everything to be with me. That means a lot. That's why I need to do him proud at the London Olympics as well and prove it wasn't in vain or for no reason, just that it was all worth it."

Pendleton has dominated her sport for eight years but tells documentary makers that one weakness is her lack of confidence.

"When I am at competition, I spend a lot of time questioning myself," she said.

"It's one of my biggest flaws, caring what other people think of me. I don't want to be a let-down."

She adds: "Maybe I do kind of seek some kind of approval in the people around me. It really matters what they think. I want them to be proud of me and I want them to be pleased with what I've done. That makes me feel good about myself."

Pendleton has managed to keep her emotions in check but credits British Cycling psychiatrist Dr Steve Peters with helping her.

In the BBC One documentary, Peters said he had spoken at length with a very emotional Pendleton following her disappointing Olympic campaign in Athens, where she finished sixth in the time trial and ninth in the women's 200m sprint.

"She basically cried for two hours," he said.

"Vicky had no self-confidence, she had no way of controlling impulsive thinking, she had no way of containing emotion, she didn't know how to deal with emotion, she couldn't communicate well with people, she wasn't assertive... the list went on and on."

Pendleton says the discussion had a positive impact on her, helping to turn her from Olympic failure to Olympic champion.

Now, as she prepares to defend her title in London, Pendleton says she intends to bow out of the sport a winner.

"The only thing that really matters to me is going well in London," she said. "That's all that matters. That's all I'm trying to do. I want it to be the most amazing exit that I could possibly have from the sport."

London 2012: Diver Tom Daley 'stronger' after family heartache

By Nick Hope

TOM DALEY ON THE BBC

• Monday 23 July at 22:35 BST on BBC One: Tom Daley - Diving for Britain

British diver Tom Daley says he wants to win an Olympic medal for his family after a turbulent year.

The teenager lost his father, Rob, to cancer in May 2011 and was also criticised for spending too much time on media commitments.

"It's about time we got some good news in our family," he told BBC Sport.

"It's definitely been a tough year, but it's helped me gain a lot of motivation and inspiration and made me stronger."

Daley's father was believed to be in remission following the removal of a brain tumour in 2006. However, a scan in 2010 revealed it had returned. He eventually lost his fight for life in May last year.

"We kind of knew that it was inevitable, it was just a question of when," said Daley, 18.

"It brought me closer to my dad. I think if he didn't have that brain tumour, we wouldn't have been so close. It's great that we've had that really strong connection."

Daley, who made his Olympic debut in Beijing four years ago, continued to compete while his dad was ill.

He won European gold in the 10m platform event in 2008 and became world champion in 2009. He then won double gold at the 2010 Commonwealth Games in Delhi.

But just eight weeks after his father's death, he finished fifth at the 2011 World Championships in Shanghai.

"I wasn't prepared properly because I had just lost my dad and it was about going in there and giving it my best shot," said Daley. "I know he would have wanted me to have carried on."

In February of this year, GB diving performance director Alexei Evangulov criticised Daley for spending too much time on media work.

Daley insists he has never lost focus and pays little to what is written or said in the media.

"To be honest, I don't watch anything, I don't look at the papers," he said.

"I look at some of the pictures and watch some of my dives back but apart from that I focus on training and competitions. I can't focus on what others are writing or saying, so I have to focus on myself."

Daley claimed overall victory in the World Series in April and followed that up with European Championship goldand new British record score in Eindhoven in May.

He then secured qualification for London 2012 with victory at the GB Olympic trials in Sheffield.

His first event in London, the 10m synchro, will take place on Monday, 30 July. He will then return for the 10m individual preliminaries on 10 August.

"London 2012 is the biggest thing in my life," said Daley. "It's going to be an amazing experience and I'm going to really try and go in there and do the best six dives that I could ever do. For me, it means everything."

As I progress with my research and begin to think about categorising I decided it was time to look at how my research fit into the categories Primary, Secondary, Quantitative, Qualitative. This allowed me to make sure I was making the most of my research and effectively planning my time with my project. Here are some charts I created based on the sheets handed out at the summer briefing. I have also added my own aspects to allow me to make the most out of this information and plan my time effectively.

I have started to think about moving on, I am now set on my initial theme of the Olympics, however I am beginning to consider whether to categorise further to create a stronger theme and focus for my brief. 


I have really enjoyed learning more about the olympics through secondary research, and the past three posts about controversies relating to the Olympics have really engaged me, as this is something that I found interesting, I may take this forward and research further into the controversies. 


I also need to begin constructing some primary research; this will occur more in the next 2 or 3 weeks after I have research further using secondary sources and also after my own visit to the London 2012 olympics in just 12 days now.

Three Olympiads had to pass without a celebration of the Games because of war: the 1916 Games were cancelled because of World War I, and the summer and winter games of 1940 and 1944 were cancelled because of World War II. The South Ossetia War between Georgia and Russia erupted on the opening day of the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing. Both President Bush and Prime Minister Putin were attending the Olympics at that time and spoke together about the conflict at a luncheon hosted by Chinese President Hu Jintao. 

When Nino Salukvadze of Georgia won the bronze medal in the 10 meter air pistol competition, she stood on the medal podium with Natalia Paderina, a Russian shooter who had won the silver. In what became a much-publicized event from the Beijing Games, Salukvadze and Paderina embraced on the podium after the ceremony had ended.

Terrorism has had an impact on the Olympic Games. In 1972, when the Summer Games were held in Munich, Germany, eleven members of the Israeli Olympic team were taken hostage by the terrorist group Black September in what is now known as the Munich massacre. The terrorists killed two of the athletes soon after they had taken them hostage and killed the other nine during a failed liberation attempt. A German police officer and 5 terrorists also perished. 

During the Summer Olympics in 1996 in Atlanta, United States, a bomb was detonated at the Centennial Olympic Park, which killed two and injured 111 others. The bomb was set by Eric Robert Rudolph, an American domestic terrorist, who is currently serving a life sentence for the bombing. Security at the Olympic Games has been an increasing concern and focus for Olympic planners since the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001.

Information sourced from Wikipedia.

Women athletes were first allowed to compete at the 1900 Summer Olympics in Paris, but at the 1992 Summer Olympics thirty-five countries were still fielding all-male delegations. This number dropped rapidly over the following years. In 1996, Lita Fariman was the first woman to compete for Iran at the Olympics, in shooting. In 2000, Bahrain sent two women competitors for the first time:Fatema Hameed Gerashi and Mariam Mohamed Hadi Al Hilli. 

In 2004, Robina Muqim Yaar and Friba Razayee became the first women to compete for Afghanistan at the Olympics. In 2008, theUnited Arab Emirates sent female athletes (Maitha Al Maktoum competed in taekwondo, and Latifa Al Maktoum in equestrian) to the Olympic Games for the first time. Both athletes were from Dubai's ruling family.

By 2010 only three countries had never sent female athletes to the Games: Brunei, Saudi Arabia and Qatar. Brunei had taken part in only three celebrations of the Games, sending a single athlete on each occasion, but Saudi Arabia and Qatar had been competing regularly with all-male teams. In 2010, the International Olympic Committee announced it would "press" these countries to enable and facilitate the participation of women for the 2012 Summer Games; Anita DeFrantz, chair of the IOC's Women and Sports Commission, suggested that countries be barred if they prevented women from competing. 

Shortly thereafter, the Qatar Olympic Committee announced that it "hoped to send up to four female athletes in shooting and fencing" to the 2012 Summer Games in London. In Saudi Arabia, by contrast, national law explicitly prohibited women from competing at the Olympics – the only country where this was the case.

In 2008, Ali Al-Ahmed, director of the Institute for Gulf Affairs, likewise called for Saudi Arabia to be barred from the Games, describing its ban on women athletes as a violation of the International Olympic Committee charter. He noted: "For the last 15 years, many international nongovernmental organizations worldwide have been trying to lobby the IOC for better enforcement of its own laws banning gender discrimination. [...] While their efforts did result in increasing numbers of women Olympians, the IOC has been reluctant to take a strong position and threaten the discriminating countries with suspension or expulsion." 

In July 2010, The Independent reported: "Pressure is growing on the International Olympic Committee to kick out Saudi Arabia, who are likely to be the only major nation not to include women in their Olympic team for 2012. [...] Should Saudi Arabia [...] send a male-only team to London, we understand they will face protests from equal rights and women's groups which threaten to disrupt the Games".

In June 2012, The Saudi Arabian Embassy in London announced it would let its female athletes compete in the Olympics in 2012 for the first time. Qatar and Brunei also reversed course in 2012 and said they would send athletes to the games that begin 27 July in London, England. Ultimately, Saudi Arabia included two female athletes in its delegation; Qatar, four; and Brunei, one (Maziah Mahusin, in the 400m hurdles). Qatar made one of its first female Olympians, Bahiya al-Hamad (shooting), its flagbearer at the 2012 Games.

The only sport on the Olympic programme that features men and women competing together is the equestrian disciplines. There is no "Women's Eventing", or 'Men's Dressage'. As of 2008 there were still more medal events for men than women. With the addition of women's boxing to the programme in the 2012 Summer Olympics, however, female athletes will be able to compete in all the same sports as men.

There are currently two Olympic events which male athletes may not compete at: synchronized swimming and rhythmic gymnastics.

Saudi Arabia agreed on 12 July 2012 to send two women to compete in the 2012 Olympic games in London, England. The two female athletes are Wodjan Ali Seraj Abdulrahim Shahrkhani in judo and 800-meter runner Sarah Attar. Prior to June 2012, Saudi Arabia had banned female athletes from competing at the Olympics. Every country competing at the London Games will include female athletes for the first time in Olympic history.

Information sourced from Wikipedia.