STEPHEN WILSON
AP sports writer
Four-time Olympic champion Michael Johnson crouched at the starting line, burst forward and ran down the track at the 80,000-capacity stadium.
Never mind that Johnson was only running for fun against a group of local school kids, the track was just a temporary 60-metre strip of carpet and most of the seats were empty.
Exactly two years before the opening of the London Olympics, Johnson provided a glimpse last Tuesday of what fans can look forward to when the greatest sports show on earth comes to town on 27 July, 2012.
“Obviously knowing that the Olympics are coming in two years’ time, it’s great to be here,” said Johnson, a two-time 400-metre champion and gold medallist in the 200 and 4x400 relay. “Everything seems to be on time. The stadium looks great. It’s going to be very exciting.”
The starter for Johnson’s race was Sebastian Coe, the former Olympic middle-distance great who heads London’s organising committee.
“It’s just scintillating,” Coe said. “Here’s the greatest 400-metre runner the world has ever seen, and arguably the best 200-metre runner, and this is a guy that’s running down a strip of tartan down the middle of your stadium two years out. It doesn’t get any better.”
Johnson wasn’t the only athlete who came out to showcase London’s Olympic venues as part of a series of activities across the city to mark the two-year countdown.
The spotlight was on the Olympic Park site in east London, where the external structures of the main venues are already complete and the arenas are set to be finished next year and ready to stage test events.
British cyclist Chris Hoy, who holds four Olympic gold medals, took a few spins around a temporary track inside the velodrome as construction workers wearing yellow hard hats cheered from the stands.
“You do imagine what it’s going to be like when it’s filled to the rafters, when it’s the Olympic final,” Hoy said. “You can sense that as soon as you walk in. It does get me really enthusiastic for it.”
At the temporary basketball venue, where the floor still hasn’t been installed, former NBA player John Amaechi shot a few hoops.
While the Olympic project is on track and on budget, organisers are under scrutiny as Britain’s coalition government carries out £40 billion in public spending cuts to trim the record budget deficit.
The government recently ordered relatively modest cuts of £27 million in the budget of the Olympic Delivery Authority, the body responsible for building the venues. The overall construction and infrastructure budget stands at £9.325 billion.
The government has not ruled out further Olympic cuts.
Coe’s separate privately financed organising committee budget is £2 billion, raised from sponsorships, television fees, ticket sales and merchandising.
“We wake up every morning trying to figure out how we can deliver this in a more cost effective and efficient way,” Coe said.
Earlier in the day, organisers launched a programme to recruit 70,000 volunteers and urged people to apply for specialist positions such as doctors, anti-doping personnel and scoreboard operators. The sign-up for more general volunteer positions will open on 15 September.
London Mayor Boris Johnson announced a separate programme to recruit 8,000 “London Ambassadors” who will man key points across the city, such as railway stations and tourist spots, to help guide visitors around the capital.
“These will be the polite, courteous, smiling – without being irritating – faces of the city,” Johnson said. “London will be the centre of the greatest party on earth.”
Organisers urged fans to keep registering their interest in tickets, which will go on sale next year. So far, more than 1.4 million have registered. A total of eight million tickets for the Olympics and two million for the Paralympics will be on sale.
“Now it’s the public’s turn,” Coe said. “Don’t wait. Start planning your games now.”
The London 2012 committee opened its flagship merchandising store at St Pancras International station in central London where, for the first time, soft toys of the child-friendly, one-eyed mascots Wenlock and Manderville went on sale at $38 apiece.
From St Pancras, Olympic organisers, athletes and dignitaries took the Javelin bullet train for the six-minute journey to the Stratford International station at the Olympic Park.
The group toured the venues and walked across the new main bridge or “front door” to the Olympic Park and get a firsthand look at progress on the one-square-mile site. A once-deprived industrial area of the capital is being transformed into a new complex of venues and parkland that will be turned over to the public after the games.
Michael Johnson recalled the two-year countdown when he was training for the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, where he won the 200 and 400 and broke the 200 world record.
“There was just so much buzz and excitement from that point on,” he said. “From two years out, for all of the athletes, this is certainly a motivation. It is reminding them what they’re training for every day.”
Johnson said the intimate nature of the Olympic stadium could be crucial.
“It’s not about the stadium itself,” he said. “It’s about the crowd who come, and the spectators, and the energy that you get from those spectators. The more intimate a stadium is the more the athletes will feel that type of atmosphere.”
Despite the overcast and muggy conditions on Tuesday, Coe said he can imagine world records being set in the stadium in 2012.
“This is actually not a bad climate to be breaking world records in,” he said. “This would be a perfect track and field day.”
And how does he envisage the scene during the opening ceremony in the same arena two years from now?
“I imagine lots of people in the crowd,” he said, “and two or three people – particularly sitting around my seat – certainly being quite nervous.”
One in 40 of London’s roads to form the Olympic route
STUART CONDIE
AP sports writer
Olympic organisers will create designated routes across 2.5 per cent of London’s roads to help athletes, officials and dignitaries get around the congested city during the 2012 Games.
A total of 168 kilometres of roads will be designated as part of the Olympic Route Network, organisers announced last week.
Roads will remain open to regular users but traffic signals will be adjusted and roadwork suspended to speed passage between central London, the Olympic Park in the east of the city and other venues, including Wembley Stadium and the All England Club at Wimbledon.
In addition, so-called “Games Lanes” for sole use of Olympic traffic will be installed along key routes of the ORN, such as the east-to-west Thames Embankment and Park Lane on the east edge of Hyde Park.
“Other host cities have learned the hard way the importance of having a well organised and efficient transport system,” government Olympics Minister Hugh Robertson said. “This is absolutely critical to a successful games and without it we will not be able to move around athletes, officials and the media with the necessary degree of certainty.
“These plans strike an appropriate balance between the demands of hosting this unique event and the day-to-day needs of residents and businesses.”
Motorists will be fined £200 if they stray into the 97 kilometres of Games Lanes, almost double the amount currently levied on those who fail to pay the central London congestion charge.
Another 276 kilometres of designated ORN roads will be set up around venues outside the city, such as the sailing venue in Weymouth and Portland in southeast England.
The Olympic Delivery Authority, Transport for London and central government hope the lanes and a £6.5 billion investment in public transport will avoid a repeat of the travel problems that have marred previous events, such as the 1996 Atlanta Olympics.
Former Britain team swimmer Karen Pickering, a part-time London resident, competed at four Summer Games. Having been in Atlanta, she had heard tales of frustration from fellow athletes.
“The margins now in winning are so minute that every little detail helps,” Pickering said. “On a typical race day we know exactly what time we will be racing. Everything is planned to fine detail so that no time is wasted and you are ready to perform at your absolute best.
“There is no point preparing like that if you have a rough time getting to your race. Athletes need to have confidence they will get there. What we don’t need is added stress and added pressure.”
About 82,000 people are expected to use the network, but tailored information will be distributed with tickets to help meet organisers’ target of all spectators travelling to venues by public transport.
The ORN will run from 6am until midnight for the 17 days of the Olympics, although venue specific routes will operate only on days of competition.
The route will involve the suspension of some bus stops, parking bays and turnoffs, as well as the installation of some temporary bridges to compensate for the games-time closure of pedestrian crossings.
The International Olympic Committee has said it will use public transport “where appropriate,” but TfL and the ODA have yet to give the IOC specific detail on how it will be tailored to their needs.
“If we need to find ways of making public transport attractive to them, we will,” London Transport Commissioner Paul Hendy said. “We haven’t got that far yet. We’re still two years away.”
Hendy said the Javelin train, which takes seven minutes to run from central London to the Olympic site, could run 24 hours a day.
IOC officials and media may be granted a separate entrance to the train stations or designated train carriages to encourage them to be among the 12,500 people that could make the journey each hour.
TfL will conduct a test of its systems on 16 December. That is the penultimate Friday before Christmas, which is traditionally the busiest day on London’s public transport network and roads.
London Mayor Boris Johnson conceded that the Games Lanes will likely limit other road traffic to a crawl, but emphasised the benefit to athletes – many of whom will be travelling from the athletes’ village in the Olympic Park to their events.
“It will mean some inconvenience for London’s other drivers,” Johnson said. “I will not pretend you will be able to bomb along the embankment. But they will hopefully consider the inconvenience they will undoubtedly suffer a price worth paying.”
China: No more tolerance for age falsification
China will not tolerate age falsification and has enforced stringent checks upon its 70-athlete delegation to the inaugural Youth Olympics in Singapore next month, a top sports official was quoted as saying.
China has long been accused of athlete age falsification. Earlier this year, its women’s gymnastics team from the 2000 Sydney Olympics was stripped of its bronze medal after an investigation found Dong Fangxiao (pictured) was only 14 at the time. Gymnasts must turn at least 16 during an Olympic year to be eligible to compete.
The delegation going to Singapore will be “very clean and transparent,” Cai Zhenhua, vice president of the State General Administration of Sport, was quoted as saying in the official China Daily newspaper.
“We’ve scrutinised every athlete’s age in the delegation for the Youth Olympic Games to make sure there is no one going to Singapore with a fake age,” Cai was quoted as saying.
Authorities checked six forms of ID for the athletes who range in age from 14 to 18: birth certificates, national ID cards, passports, domestic athlete registration cards and domestic and international authentication for competitions, the report said. Those under age 16 have also undergone bone-age analyses.
Cyclist Rebellin loses Olympic doping appeal
Italian cyclist Davide Rebellin (pictured) lost an appeal on Friday against a decision to strip him of his 2008 Olympic silver medal for doping.
The Court of Arbitration for Sport ruled that the International Olympic Committee was right to disqualify Rebellin from his Beijing medal after he tested positive for the banned blood-boosting drug CERA. The CAS panel of three lawyers rejected Rebellin’s arguments that mistakes were made in testing his blood sample and the test itself was not valid.
“The procedures of the chain of custody have been complied with and... there was no departure from the international standards for laboratories which could have reasonably caused an abnormal analysis result,” CAS said in a statement. “The presence of CERA has been validly detected in the blood samples of the athlete.”
Rebellin was caught in April 2009, eight months after the Beijing Games road race, when the IOC retested the Olympic samples for traces of CERA.
The IOC said in a statement it was “pleased to note that its decision to disqualify Davide Rebellin... and to withdraw his silver medal has been confirmed.”
The 39-year-old Italian denied doping, but was immediately suspended by Italy’s Olympic committee and his team at the time, Diquigiovanni-Androni. The Italian Olympic body also demanded Rebellin repay his €75,000 silver medal bonus.
Rebellin now faces being suspended by the International Cycling Union and stripped of other race results.
With Rebellin’s disqualification finally confirmed, the IOC said it will reallocate the silver medal to Switzerland’s Fabian Cancellara, who finished third in Beijing. Fourth-place finisher Alexander Kolobnev of Russia will get bronze.
Samuel Sanchez of Spain won the gold medal in Beijing.
CERA is an advanced version of the hormone EPO, which stimulates the production of oxygen-carrying red blood cells.
It was first detected in sports by the French anti-doping agency, which developed a test and caught four cyclists more than two months after the 2008 Tour de France.
That success prompted the IOC to retest blood samples from Beijing. Rebellin was one of five Beijing athletes who were later disqualified when their samples came back positive for CERA.
Rebellin’s blood was analysed at the Chatenay-Malabry lab near Paris.
CAS said that Rebellin’s sample had also been tested in Beijing for traces for human growth hormone.