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Final NOCs Receiving London 2012 Cauldron Petals as Sponsor UPS Winds Down Operations |
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Olympics - 06 Dec 2012 - By Simon Ward
UPS, the international logistics firm that was a domestic sponsor of this year’s Olympic and Paralympic Games in London, is this week completing the deliveries of copper ‘petals’ from the distinctive Olympic cauldron to nations around the world.
The task of sending the souvenirs to 204 national Olympic committees is one of the company’s last commitments as the official logistics and express delivery supporter of the games.
The London organising committee had pledged that the petals, which were brought into the main stadium to form the cauldron during the opening ceremony of the Olympics on July 27, would subsequently be distributed to the competing nations.
The acclaimed cauldron, the brainchild of British designer Thomas Heatherwick, was made up of 370 custom-made petals and remained alight during the Olympics and Paralympics.
The contract of UPS, which was responsible for transporting equipment and important packages to sports venues and other facilities at the games, expires at the end of the year and the company said that it was grateful to be able to deliver the petals, which have been engraved and encased in presentation boxes.
In a recent interview with Sportcal, Alan Williams, director of London 2012 sponsorship and operations at UPS, said: “Operationally the final part of what we’re doing is [sending] the petals from the cauldron. We’ve been working with the manufacturer up in Yorkshire [in northern England] to provide special packaging and we’ve been shipping those out to all the countries around the world.
“It’s the final piece of the jigsaw, apart from the bump out of the actual living products, and a quite a nice thing to finish on.”
UPS said today that, in the three months since the end of the Olympics and Paralympics, it had cleared all the venues, including the main Olympic Park, carrying out over 17,000 deliveries of related inventory.
The products, including 1 million pieces of sporting equipment, have been delivered to the company’s two dedicated London 2012 warehouses ready for return, resale or recycling.
UPS contributed a report on its experience to the International Olympic Committee’s London 2012 debrief recently held in Rio de Janeiro and is presently conducting its own end-of-project analysis.
Reflecting on the sponsorship, Williams said last month that, based on key performance indicators, UPS was “slightly ahead” of where it wanted to be at this stage, having been able to attract significant new business.
He said that the company, which was also a sponsor of the 2008 Beijing Olympics, had met with the organisers of the 2016 games in Rio but that it was too early to tell whether it would be involved in the event.
Williams said: “There’s always potential [for another Olympics] but we look at it on a case-by-case basis. I think every games is so unique. We have been talking to Rio but no decision has been made on that yet.
“Time-wise, we’ve still got to finalise the results of London and, based on that, look at how that would apply to Rio and how much infrastructure we’ve got in Rio.”
Sportcal |
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