Olympics will be gold standard says Locog chief

Despite the weight of expectation on his shoulders Mr Deighton was remarkably relaxed about how work on the Olympic and Paralympic project is progressing when he spoke to the Wharf at his Canary Wharf offices last week.

He said: "If you'd said to me three and a half years ago would you take this position I'd have said, in a heartbeat, 'yes'.

"We didn't really expect to be trying to do all this in the midst of a recession, so to find ourselves able to look out and see an Olympic Stadium that from the outside looks finished, and in not so many months time will be finished, is incredible."

The economic crisis has increased pressure on Locog, even though it is privately funded, with some people arguing it is an expense Britain could do without. Mr Deighton, a former Goldman Sachs banker, disagrees and argued it has made Locog very cost conscious.

He said: "It's made us incredibly focused on what I would describe as a very large de-risking exercise, if you want to put it in financial terms.

"Our plan is all about bringing in £2billion of revenue - through ticketing and licensing for example - and reducing the uncertainty attached to getting that, against bringing in your costs at a £2billion level so they match and we don't have to ask taxpayers for any money.

"Look at the money we've raised from the private sector. Locog siphons private money in to alleviate the taxpayers' costs for the Games. We now have something like £530million of sponsorship already raised against our target of £700million.

"In this environment that's gravity defying. What could we have done in a bull market? But even in this terrible market that's hit our target and it gives us great financial security."

Locog has saved money by reassessing the use of temporary venues and utilising existing facilities to host competitions. One contentious venue is Greenwich Park, which will stage the equestrian events. Mr Deighton believes residents' fears of permanent damage to the park have been overstated.

He said: "The objections were we were going to be digging up the Park, knocking down trees, uprooting archaelogical ruins, doing all sorts of horrible things.

"But we have explained we will not be cutting down any trees, we've designed a course to avoid that, and after consultation we decided not to take a jump through the duck pond, which worried both the ducks and the residents.

"The course is not going to touch anything sensitive. In China it was held on the Hong Kong Jockey Club's golf course and they were playing golf on it a week later. That shows the scale of damage.

"People have to understand that what happens is about 70 horses run round, one after the other, just once. Damage is very superficial and dealt with quickly.

"Issues about access to the Park, and during Games time how they will get to their houses and what about the traffic, are issues we have at all our venues. We have a series of issues about disruption and we say to people we will manage things as best we can. That's the price of having this wonderful event here."

The legacy use of the Olympic Stadium in Stratford is still to be decided, a question for Boris Johnson and his team at the London Development Agency. But it will primarily be used for athletics, something Mr Deighton feels is only fitting.

He said: "The only thing that matters to me is that it has a future use and therefore it is not a white elephant. That was a very strong commitment from the bid and right through.

"That's why we've only built permanently a relatively few number of venues.

"Most of the venues are either existing or are temporary. The ones we build we want to be able to say in 2020 'look at that, it's really working'. Personally, as long as it passes that test I'll be very happy.

"The second test is that right from the beginning of this whole bid we have promised a track and field legacy, that being the blue riband event of the Games, so it's appropriate to leave behind the nation's premier track and field capability.

"Of course you can do that in the 25,000 capacity stadium we are currently anticipating. But if for any reason a bigger size can be justified, which can be based on other sports - and as long as we can still have track and field there - then I'll be happy.

"Turn the answer the other way round. If by adding football or rugby and that makes 50,000 or 80,000 sustainable, fine. But the challenge is really proving you can really create something sustainable to do that.

"I don't get too excited about it because I think it'll keep on being talked about until the Games have happened. We'll be in a different economic environment then.

"We will just have had the Games and that will create a very strong feeling about the Park and Stadium. Unless somebody says 'stop, don't take off the 55,000' the default option - the path the Olympic Delivery Authority is on, for which they are funded - is to deliver after the Games the 25,000."

Another issue is ticketing. It emerged this week that the original estimate of making tickets available for as little as £15 is unlikely to happen for a variety of economic reasons. But Mr Deighton is convinced tickets will still be affordable.

He said: "We're working through our pricing strategy now and will finish that by next year. The basic philosophy is there will be a very wide range of ticket prices and packages that fit everyone.

"There will certainly be accessible, affordable tickets and there will be some elite-type tickets that will help us raise money and will help us sell cheap tickets.

"So if anyone says 'how can you sell a ticket for the opening ceremony that costs a few hundred pounds' it's because it means I can also sell some for, say, £30. Otherwise we wouldn't be able to put the Games on.

'We could always go back and ask taxpayers for more, which generally I find is not well received. We try to avoid that."

Not everyone who wants to experience the Olympics necessarily wants to watch the sport, so non-event tickets will be available to allow people access to the Olympic Park.

"To get into the Park you need a ticket," said Mr Deighton.

"You might have an event ticket, so that does it, but what we're exploring is whether we have a NET - a non-event ticket.

"We're currently trying to work out how many of those NETs we can sell an day, which will be based on how much room there is in the Park, how much of it is already taken up by people in the Park to see an event.

"You have to make assumptions about how long the people with tickets actually stay in the Park, so you put all that in a model and you come up with an idea of how many non-event tickets we can sell."

"NETS will be very affordably priced because for us it's more about giving people the opportunity to have the experience than about making money.

"The only reason there will be a charge will be to make sure there is some kind of seriousness about coming, rather than just having people steam through the Park and out again."

Beijing suffered from certain events being played out in front of empty stands, with ticketholders surprisingly absent for long periods. It is something London is determined to avoid.

"The first thing we did was diagnose why we thought they had empty seats in Beijing," said Mr Deigthon.

"That's the first way of figuring out the solution.

"One reason was they distributed a lot of tickets on what I would describe as a political basis, distributed them to the outer provinces where people were never really very likely to attend the Games.

"They just framed the ticket as a souvenir and hung it on their wall. I don't think we're going to do any of that because we're really going to make sure we're going to sell tickets to the people who most want to come.

"Secondly there were some sports where the session lengths, the one we usually refer to is beach volleyball which were six or seven hours. No matter how die-hard a beach volleyball fan - and there are some - but sitting there watching four, five or six matches would kill anybody. We're reducing the session lengths to consumable chunks.

"That produces some other interesting challenges, most of them operational. I was over at Earls Court, talking about the indoor volleyball. We've got three hour sessions there, which are two match sessions.

"That means we have three sessions a day, which creates a crossover period where you have 13,000 people coming in more or less at the same time as you've got 13,000 people going out, twice a day. Operationally turning the venue twice to create three sessions is the expertise you bear to reduce the session length.

"Then there are other things like people turn up late and go home early, so are there things we can do like they do at Wimbledon where you zap people's ticket when they leave and they say they are not coming back and that sends a signal to the ticket office that releases that seat, to get that ticket on a recycled price basis for the last half hour.

"People got more excited after Beijing because we started to win a lot of medals and home medal success is very healthy.

"In fact, in our ticketing model, where we try to estimate demand, the probability of a British medallist is one of the factors that we put into the model that increases demand because you just know they turn up with their Union Jacks and go absolutely nuts."

That means demand will be high to see the likes of local girl Christine Ohuruogu (pictured) in action, as well as Britain's most successful sports like cycling and rowing.

Plans are also being developed to ensure seats allocated to accredited groups, such as VIPs, are used throughout the Games.

He said: "The accredited groups get an area that's kind of segmented for them, and whether or not they turn up is harder to predict because they won't have paid for their tickets or booked in. We're just sort of guessing.

"What happens is that accredited seating is heavily used for the semi-finals and finals but generally much less heavily used in the preliminary rounds. So in an ideal world what you want is flexible accredited seating so when there's less accredited demand that shrinks which gives you more capacity to sell to general spectators. Then it expands again when the accredited guys come to watch something.

"The skill to getting that right is (a) to understand the demand and (b) having the operational capability to contract and expand because you have to deal with things like the security aspect. You can't have Fred who just came off the street sitting next to the President of Uruguay.

"Security underpins everything because we're committed to having a safe and secure Games and everybody will expect that. Of course we want to deliver that in a way that doesn't impinge on any of the events."

Mr Deighton had a clear message to send out about the Games.

He said: "It's on time, it's on budget, everything is going exactly as we hoped and we will, all together, stage a Games that this nation can be really, really proud of.

"What we're going to build up to over the next three years is a real sense of excitement and involvement and we want as many people to get involved as they can.

"It's going to be bigger and more fun and more involved than people really appreciate. Figure out how you can be a part of it."