London 2012: Tragedy or Comedy?

The Olympics arrive on our shores in just a few days time. But we're so tied up in bad news, criticism and scaremongering, not to mention the weather,  it'll be a wonder that other competing countries aren't considering cashing in their tickets and spending this summer at home instead. 

To the casual reader, it's working up to be a Greek tragedy or, depending on how you look at it, a comedy of epic proportions. 

First we had the ticket debacle, then it was the sponsorship debacle, and we're now heavily embroiled in the security debacle (with a brief detour via the workers exploitation debacle). 

A comedy of errors to challenge even the best literary scholar. 

The biggest sporting event in the world and so far, as a country, we've managed to cock up the ticketing, balls up the staffing, and pretty much generate nothing but bad press every step of the way. 

In some respects it's almost impressive. 

The Olympics hasn't graced our small island for some 64 years. And, to be ruthlessly fair to the organisers, there's not much precedent for how to run the event in the UK. 

In the course of just 7 years they've had to build stadiums from scratch, re-organise public transport facilities, mount a sales and marketing operation that serves millions of customers across the globe, recruit and train tens of thousands of employees, as well as please stakeholders from every nation on this small planet. 

I'm not sure there are many companies (or governments, for that matter) that would be able to cope with the this level of upscaling and impact in similar timescales. 

G4S, a company which has 657,000 employees in over 125 countries and is the biggest of its kind in the world, has failed to deliver. But fair play to them, their original contract called for 2,000 staff. It wasn't until 7 months ago that the goal posts changed and their target quintupled. The fact they've managed to hire and train an additional 4,500 staff during that period is no small feat, irrespective of what you might currently think of them. 

Ticketmaster, part of the biggest live entertainment company in the world and accomplished at selling around 140 million tickets every year, has also struggled to win Olympic gold. Every stage of the ticketing process dogged in controversy and, seemingly, incompetency. 

So how come we're getting it so wrong? Why are all of these world class, market leading organisations failing to deliver? Who is the jester in the corner?

This isn't a case of paying peanuts and hiring monkeys. Has this been a classic case of death by committee? Too many cooks spoil the broth? The metaphors abound. 

The time for asking awkward questions will surely come. However, in the meantime, to paraphrase Lord Coe: 

If it were a walk in the park, everyone would be doing it. We have just 14 days to get this right. 

So true.