London 2012 cubic zirconia medal winners

The cubic zirconia medal winners are…

Recycling/rubbish bins

I give credit for the effort to make London 2012 the first zero-waste Games but it was a complete failure.

There were four different colored bins and even though I have a university degree and I examined the labels on the bins, I still had no clue as to what type of packaging goes in what bin except for the purple bin as that was designated solely for ponchos. London 2012 boasted how “recycling could not be easier in venues” because all the food and drink packaging were to feature a green, orange or black symbol, so all we had to do was put the packaging in the matching colored bin.

It was a simple and brilliant concept except it failed.

During my time in various Olympic venues, I found one item which had a colored symbol – a McDonald’s straw wrapper. Not only did the packaging not contain the colored symbol but there was an education issue about how to recycle. There was no signage around the bins or in the venues explaining the brilliant color-coding recycling concept. I knew of it because I stumbled upon it on the London 2012 website while looking for something else. I’m confident that I am one of two people who were aware of the color-coding recycling concept. The other person was Peter because I told him about it.

In conclusion, everyone was confused about how to recycle and therefore, no one recycled. People approached the bins and when they didn’t see any drawing or explanation of what the bin should contain, they would do their best to figure out which bin to select based on the contents of the bin and when that failed, they just chucked their rubbish in one of the bins or set it on the ground in front of the bins, indicating complete confusion.

London 2012 tickets

I’ve beaten this one to death over previous posts, so I’ll keep this one short and sweet.

• Too many reserved seats for sponsors and corporations, most of which never attended the sessions.
• Too many reserved seats for athletes, families of athletes, referees, and other London 2012 professionals. Again, most of them never attended the sessions.
• Too many reserved seats for Ticket Resolution issues.
• Too many handicap accessible reserved seats that were never occupied with no method of releasing those tickets for sale at the venue.
• No method of re-releasing old tickets which were traded in for new tickets via Ticket Resolution.
• No notification when tickets were re-released to the London 2012 website, mainly because London2012.com would never have been able to handle the load. It couldn’t even handle the load when tickets were secretly re-released in the middle of the night.

CoSport tickets

CoSport was the Olympic ticket provider for the United States and a few other countries. I purchased tickets for three events from CoSport: Tennis, rowing, and diving. We had issues with all three events.

Per CoSport’s Terms and Conditions, details of rescheduled sessions would display on their website and ticket holders for rescheduled sessions would also receive the details via email. Our tennis session was rescheduled but no information displayed on CoSport.com and I didn’t receive an email. I emailed CoSport asking for a partial refund as they broke their terms and they replied to me stating, “Unfortunately not – we do not have any control over the Olympic events”.

No salutation. No closing. No complete sentences. No apology. No rebuttal to my detailed email pointing out exactly where they broke their Ts&Cs. Nothing. Just a poorly constructed sentence (?) breaking the news that CoSport doesn’t have control over the Olympics which I already knew.

I’ve sent four additional emails to CoSport on the same email thread, all of which have gone unanswered and have filed a complaint with the Better Business Bureau. It’s not CoSport’s first complaint and it won’t be their last.

Our second CoSport issue was that our rowing seats were not seated next to one another and the third issue was that our diving seats should never have been sold in the first place.

I’m quite unhappy with CoSport and would like my $600 back.

London2012.com

I read an article at some point that stated that the London 2012 website was built as though it was 1996. I feel that’s giving the website too much credit.

• It didn’t display information on rescheduled sessions.
• It was hard to navigate: too many clicks required, difficult to find information, too much “fluff”, geared toward kids, etc.
• The athlete search needed to include a search by jersey number in addition to the last name.
• Session times listed on the website differed from the session time display on the ticket.
• It could not handle traffic load, especially when tickets were re-released. To put this in perspective, we would add tickets to our cart and it would take up to 30 minutes for us to be forwarded to the payment screen or told that the tickets were no longer available.
• No information on the Javelin train.
• In order to find out which country was participating in the session, you had to hover over the session which then displayed a pop-up with the country’s flag but didn’t display the country’s name. If I wanted more details, I had to click on the session and I’d be very slowly directed to a new page. The website was too fancy. They needed to keep it simple and display an image of the actual bracket, like the big bracket boards they had at the venues in the terrible photo below.

London 2012 iPhone app

Free and terrible. It was slow, hard to navigate, needed to be updated daily, and never seemed to contain information I needed.