The Olympic and Paralympic Games in numbers

Like our athletes, the UK enjoys coming first. The London 1908 Games introduced the first purpose-built Olympic stadium (including a swimming pool in the infield). The 1948 London Games was the first to be televised live. And London 2012 will be the most sustainable Olympic and Paralympic Games possible, with the carbon footprint of the entire project being mapped out.

• Over £8 billion of public funding is being invested to regenerate East London, helping make the Olympic Park one of the largest urban development projects in Europe and creating 2,818 new homes, of which 1,379 will be affordable housing.
• It took 56 Hydraulic Jacks and more than six weeks to lift the 450 ton roof structure of the Olympic stadium into place.
• Due to the use of innovative design, the London 2012 Olympic Stadium is the lightest in Olympic history, containing less than 10,000 tons of steel.
• Around 27,500 accredited broadcasters, photographers and journalists are expected at the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games. This will communicate to a potential worldwide audience of four billion people, more than the entire population of the world when London last hosted the Olympic Games in 1948.
• More than 50% of materials (by weight) for the Olympic Park were delivered by train and resulted in five-times lower CO2 emissions
• The high-speed Javelin® rail service will deliver visitors from the Olympic Park to the centre of London in just under seven minutes.
• The state-of-the-art Energy Centre on the Olympic Park will help generate electricity for the Games. It includes a Combined Cooling Heat and Power plant, which will capture the heat generated by electricity production and lead to carbon reductions of more than 1,000 tons per year
• 100 toads, 4,000 smooth newts and 300 common lizards were safely relocated off the Olympic Park to protect them from the construction work
•  The games will generate an estimates £21 Billion for the UK economy.

Courtesy of UKTI