Friday, July 8, 2011

London 2012: Ten best of the web

Twitter guidelines for athletes; Olympic Stadium controversy and a new tune at the All England Club

Andy Murray

What song will Andy Murray pick if tennis players are allowed to enter court to music during the Olympics? Photograph: Leon Neal/AFP/Getty Images

385 days to go: Here are 10 of the best pieces of London 2012 Olympics content on the web this week:

1. The 'second chance' ticket round

The much anticipated "second chance" ticket round closed on Sunday, with a further 750,000 tickets sold to 150,000 applicants who had not obtained any tickets in the opening ballot. During the first two frantic hours of the second ballot, there was such a high demand for the 40,000 remaining athletics tickets on the official website that a minority were wrongly led to believe that they had been successful in their application.

Bookmark this page for all the latest Olympic tickets news

2. High praise

The International Olympic Committee president, Jacques Rogge, praised London's "faultless" ticketing process and the "amazing" ticket sales. The three-times gold medallist Bradley Wiggins, by contrast, described the process as "a shambles".

3. Insufficient interest in the beautiful game?

It might be our national sport but it appears few people are desperate to see football at the Olympics next summer. There are still 1.5m tickets available for the men's and women's footballthe third round of sales began on Friday morning at 6am – and it is one of only three events that has yet to sell out, the other two being volleyball and freestyle wrestling. That fact alone, however, is a little misleading: after all, football is played in larger venues and hence more tickets were available to start with. In fact, football accounts for more than 2.5m of the 8.8m Olympic tickets produced in total.

Richard Williams on why we shouldn't sneer at Olympic football

4. More controversy over the Olympic Stadium

There is fresh controversy surrounding the Olympic Park Legacy Company's awarding of the Olympic Stadium to West Ham rather than Tottenham Hotspur, after it emerged that an employee, Dionne Knight, had been undertaking paid consultancy work for West Ham. The dispute between the two London clubs looks set to continue, with West Ham planning to take legal action against Spurs and the Sunday Times.

5. Equestrian site has the wow factor

A competition featuring 40 riders got under way at Greenwich Park, south-east London on Monday. It is the first large-scale event in the test series preparing sites for the Games. Despite recent protests against using the world heritage site for the Olympics, the test event drew praise from William Fox-Pitt who said the site had the "wow" factor, adding: "The surface was fantastic, better than anywhere we've seen. It was fantastic to ride on." But other eventers criticised the arena as "dead" and "nowhere near good enough".

Browse Tom Jenkins's gallery of the equestrian test event

6. Tweet away!

The IOC has published guidelines for athletes wanting to blog and post on Twitter during the Games. Postings ought to be "first-person, diary-type" entries, "dignified and in good taste" and "not contain vulgar or obscene words or images".

And so to the tweet of the week: "No!!! I just tore my lucky undies!! :( and I need them today! Have a KILLER track session. 400m 300m 200m flat out. Now what!?" – The South African paralympic sprinter Oscar Pistorius finds himself in a spot of bother.

7. A new tune at the All England Club

Locog, the 2012 Olympic organising committee, wants the tennis staged at SW19 to have a contrasting atmosphere to the 2012 Wimbledon Championships, which will have finished 20 days earlier. The organisers are eager to make the event a more rousing affair, with athletes coming on court to songs of their choice. Goodbye strawberries and cream. Hello Queen and Tina Turner.

8. Good week/bad week

It was a good week for British rowing as four of the crews hoping to win gold at 2012 won against fierce opposition at the Henley Regatta. The highlight was a record-breaking victory for the men's four against the USA, beating them by two-and-a-half strokes.

It was a bad week for Great Britain's women's hockey team, as they finished fifth in the Champions Trophy in Amsterdam. Great Britain had been hoping to build on their bronze medal in the competition last year, but were unable to replicate their achievements.

9. Spinnin' for 2012

Spinnin' for 2012, produced by Tinchy Stryder and Dionne Bromfield, is the first song released in association with the Games and will provide the soundtrack to the Olympic flame's 8,000-mile journey around the UK.

10. What you may have missed on guardian.co.uk

Donald McRae interviews the swimmer Fran Halsall

• Read the latest interviews with British Olympic hopefuls

• Browse Olympic posters between 1896 and 2008


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