The Kenya
Olympic squad arrived home with 2 Gold, 4 Silver and 5 Bronze medals, landing
on position 28 behind South Africa
and Ethiopia
as far as African countries are concerned. This was a disappointing performance
considering the high expectations that Kenyans had on the team. It was unlike
the performance in Beijing, China, where Kenya had a sum of 6 Gold, 4 Silver
and 4 Bronze medals, a record performance for the Olympic team. Interestingly,
the Kenyan squad lost the Gold medal to Mo Farah of the UK (10,000m), Tawfiq Makhloufi of Algeria (1,500m) and Stephen Kiprotich of Uganda (Marathon)
who trained in Iten in the Rift Valley region.
The London 2012 Olympics was one of the most
spectacular global events in the year 2012 with a lot going on behind the
scenes. The event turned out to be test bed for some of the most ICT endeavours
by various vendors. Construction in preparation for the event involved
considerable redevelopment, with the main focus on the Olympic Park which stood
on 490 acre piece of land. Preparation for the event is said to have cost about
£9.3 billion, the bulk of it, £5.3 billion, going to building venues and
infrastructure. The organizers estimated that 8 million spectators would
attend the Olympic Games, while 1.5 million would attend the Paralympic
Games. This provided a platform for technology companies to show case their
latest inventions.
Starting from the swimming pools, sensitive
contact pads were installed to register a swimmer’s best time. At the end of
the race, each swimmer had to press the contact pad with a minimal pressure of
6.6 pounds to record their time. The technology used was so precise that the
pads could register a time difference of one one-hundredth (0.01) of a second. On
the track events, the best times of the athletes were determined differently.
At the start of the race, the starter pistol was synchronized with the timing
console, to record the best times and detect false starts. At the finish line,
athletes would pass a laser that beamed across the track and connected to the
timing console. Additional, cameras
capturing 2000 frames per second recorded the winner of the race.
During the London 2012 Olympics, all tickets were
sold online. Most of the transactions were cashless. Spectators had to purchase
their tickets on the web in advance, to avert long queues at the entrance. Visa was the Olympics official payment provider;
spectators would use Visa to purchase snacks, drinks and so on, without cash.
In fact, ATMs were switched off by officials complying with the Visa's
sponsorship terms. Another conspicuous sponsor was O2, the second-largest
mobile telecommunications provider in the United
Kingdom and is headquartered in Slough.
The mobile operator signed a deal with Westminster City Council and the Royal
Borough of Kensington and Chelsea to make free wifi available to millions of
residents and visitors.
British Telecom was not left behind in exhibiting
her expertise during the Olympics. The telecommunications services company is
one of the largest in the world and with presence in over 170 countries. BT
delivered a cloud based voice network connecting 25 Olympic venues as the
Games' official communications services partner. A converged voice, video and
data network was provided for the London 2012 Olympics interlinking all the
venues. More than 16,500 handsets were deployed across all London Organising
Committee of the Olympic Games and Paralympic Games (LOCOG) offices and London
2012 Olympic sites ahead of the opening ceremony. The cloud service was based
on Cisco’s Hosted Unified Communications Services (HUCS) platform and had been
under testing since the end of May 2011.
3D broadcasting technology had already been
tested on sports such as basketball and big stadium events and the Wimbledon tennis finals. The London 2012 Olympics
followed suit in earnest. Panasonic had announced that the London 2012 Games
will be the first Olympics to be broadcast live in 3D. Panasonic provided 3D
equipment including camcorders, TV monitors and a technical team for live 3D TV
production at the Olympics. Various broadcasters would then pick the signal and
broadcast their customers. Coverage of the Beijing 2008 Olympics was made in
HD, but the London 2012 Olympics took it a notch higher by using the
state-of-art technology to broadcast the sports.
