I once googled the name William Cash to learn that there is a black knife murderer on death row in Alabama or some such state with the same name. Well now there’s another criminal in the Cash clan. And this one is white, aged 45 and was seen shortly before the crime carrying a Leon Max umbrella from the Serpentine Party and a plastic union jack flag.
The crime occured shortly after 8am on Tuesday morning, and I felt like a drug dealer. The proposed location of the black-market transaction for two tickets to the Dressage team finals – involving £300 in used notes – was unlikely as a crime scene: the Peter de Witts cafe – specialising in home-made English sausages and pork pies – opposite the Greenwich market.
I somehow missed the original cash rendezvous drop point so the money ended up passing hands in front of an official Olympic snack kiosk opposite the security entrance to Greenwich Park’s magnificent Equestrian stadium. I had never met my ticket source before – but she was from Devon and was mad about horses which suggested the tickets were kosher. She had been lucky enough to get five £150 tickets in the ballot and had two spare. ‘I am carrying a union jack flag and an umbrella’ I texted to her by way of identification. ‘But so is almost everybody else’ she texted back. We finally identified ourselves over the phone by way of her wearing a red top and green trousers. George Smiley would not have approved.
The entrance area to Greenwich Equestrian arena was crawling with armed police but none gave a damn about any cash dealings close to the gate. They were more worried about confiscating my plastic bottle of water. According to one Greenwich kiosk owner I spoke to, who had witnessed dozens of such transactions, they estimated over 70% of official Olympics tickets were not being used by the people who bought them. And a lot of those people turn out to be British media. Like me.
Up until Tuesday, when I (and my girlfriend, who is a horse nut) scored two tickets with hard cash, the
only media access I had to the London 2012 games was watching on the TV at home. I was not alone. Far from it. Whilst the BBC have been gloating about their all-areas Olympics access, getting so close to many
athletes that they have been blubbing during interviews and becoming so tactile with athletes that the public have complained, the hard working British regional press – along with thousands of other British
business media – have been quietly excluded from covering the games despite doing so much to support the Olympics at the bid stage and promote the Games in the last six months.
The British media is renowned around the world for its humour, political diversity, investigative skills, and sheer range. We are Gold medallists at writing splash Olympic headlines. No country in the world other than Germany comes close. America may have 35 or so gold medals but it doesn’t have a national newspaper industry – unless you count USA Today which is such a dumbed down tabloid that it suddenly makes OK! seem like Prospect.
So why when we are spending £10 billion of tax payers money hosting ‘The Greatest Show on Earth’ have some of our best and biggest media names in the national and regional press across the UK, along with global magazines like Spear’s – along with most other business and current afairs magazines – been relegated to reporting from the sofa?
It seems a case of sofa so bad. Too many of the British media have been effectively made to watch from the gutter outside the Circus Maximus in Stratford, whilst regional foreign media – which is all you really have in the US, China and Australia (New York Times, LA Times, Sydney Morning Herald et al) – get to use the VIP Media buses, the VIP Media lanes, and – most importantly – get allocated hundreds of seats at each event that they cant even be bothered to turn up to, leaving them empty. Worse they don’t even have to bother with booking any tickets. It’s access all areas – and some seemed to have their kids with them too from what I
could see from the press area at Greenwich.
This will surely be a regrettable part of the Olympics legacy. According to the International Olympics Committee there are around 27,000 media (including technicians) covering the Games, of which only 5,500 are journalists and photographers. Of this around 270 are from the UK – including for some bizarre reason a ‘media chaplain’ – with full ‘E” passes (giving unlimited access). That leaves very little room – if any – for local or regional papers, including local London papers.
Take the Wenlock Herald – my local rag in Shropshire – which is read by the market town of Much Wenlock where the modern Olympics movement was started back in the late 19th century by Wenlock doctor Dr William Penny Brookes in 1850 after he started the Shropshire Games, based on the ancient Athenian games. In 1866, Brookes founded the National Olympian Games and he is recognised as a founding father of the Modern Olympic Games, along with Baron Pierre de Coubertin whom he used to meet at the Raven Hotel in Much Wenlock, which still very much exists today. The bar serves a good range of wines – all from Tanners.
The hotel contains a museum of their exchange of letters from those early years. The Wenlock Olympian Games are still held every July. Back on 30 May, the Olympic torch of the London 2012 passed through the historic town to commemorate the debt that the modern Olympic games owes to Brookes, after whom the local school is named.
That is also why ‘Wenlock’ is the name given to one of the two official Olympic mascots, which can be purchased as a fluffy toy or as an official Olympics Cadbury’s chocolate bar. But despite this unrivalled Olympic heritage – unrivalled in the world – you will not find any correspondent from the Wenlock Herald (the local paper) actually accredited by the BOA at London 2012. The Wenlock Herald Olympics Correspondent is just another member of the UK media sofa brigade.
When I brought this exclusion of the British regional media up with the deputy editor of one of Britain’s largest regional paper groups, he told me that the way the UK regional press have been treated by the BOA had been indifferent to the point of condescending. The executive wishes to remain anonymous but he told me: ‘I know that when we were originally applying for passes, it was made very clear to us that regional press would get next to nothing – basically, only a few scraps, if available, after the nationals and internationals had had
their pick.We felt it very unfair, since LOCOG and partners had been happy to exploit us for favourable PR coverage while the stadium was being built, and taxpapers’ money being spent!’
When I was watching the English dressage team win Gold at Greenwich, my £150 (face
value) seat happened to be right next to where Jeremy Hunt, the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, was sitting with his wife and various American VIP dignatories. Princess Anne, her son Philip and her husband were a dozen or rows behind, much higher up in the Gods.
The area in between was a grey plastic desert of empty seats as seen by the photograph I took (the 45 year old Minister is wearing shades and is seated to the left surrounded by empty seats). A few rows behind Hunt, I did see a number of happy looking BBC journalists with their special BBC neck ribbons and badges in this VIP/Media area at Greenwich. Whilst the entire UK regional press have been allocated ‘scraps’ – almost no access – the BBC have 763 accredited staff at the Olympics. Thats all paid for by the tax payer.
In view of the empty seats scandal, with some 6,000 empty seats per day and the army and ‘school children’ being shipped in to fill the
seats, I wrote to Miriam Wilkens, head of the UK’s Media Operations, to ask whether professional British media – especially regional press
and business press who were not part of the approx 270 UK working print press accredited with ‘E’ passes – might be allocated any sort of media access to the Games in the light of mainly foreign media simply not showing up.
The way it works is that if you have an ‘E’ media pass, you don’t need ticketing – you can go to any event and sit in the VIP/Media enclosure, which is the Olympics equivalent of the Royal Enclosure at Ascot.
What is unclear is why the world’s media werent required to book tickets – as they need to for the swimming events and Opening/Closing ceremonies – so at least the BOA or IOA would know how many seats were
being used, and then could release some seats accordingly to accredited British gutter or sofa media. I don’t mean the Sofa Press in the Hogarthian sense here, I literally mean editors of national magazines or sports editors of the British regional equivalent to the Boston Globe who have been having to file from the sofa for the last ten days.
This empty seat scandal has quite rightly incensed Lord Moynihan – our Olympics Special Diarist – who has vocally expressed his ‘deep concerns’ about the issues relating to unused VIP/media seats, saying
after Day 3 of the Games: : ‘The problem of empty seats at London 2012 still has to be sorted. I do not feel any more relaxed today than I did two days ago. It is unfair on Team GB not to have maximum support with as many people sitting in the seats as possible. It is also absolutely unreasonable to the public, who are so supportive of Team GB, not to have the opportunity to come to a Games and enjoy an experience which most of them will never have again in the United Kingdom’.
The reply I had from Miriam Wilkens was disingenuous. She stated that we had missed the boat as ALL media accreditation was closed as long back as 2010. Yes, over two years ago !
As she explained in what read like a template letter: ‘The Media Accreditation Committee decided at
the very first meeting that no late applications would be accepted and this is something that we have maintained throughout the entire accreditation process.The accreditation process was open from Wednesday 4th August to 15 October 2010’.
However, enquiries I made – and conversations I had with fellow colleagues in the media – confirmed quite clearly that this was not accurate; it wasn’t even close to be true. An officer I spoke to at London Accreditation Media Ticketing confirmed that accreditations from UK media were being accepted ‘within the last year’.
And another senior member of your Communications team confirmed to me that ‘There were a number of accreditations given out post 2010’. Another said, comically: ‘You may be media but what right do you have more than a school child to watch the Games? They are just as deserving’.
Right. Perhaps the most glaring proof of this misinformation from the BOA came when it was revealed only last month that The Voice, Britain’s oldest and widely read black newspaper had originally been refused accreditation to the Olympics. The official rejection letter reply received by the editor of The Voice from the BOA even blatantly contradicted the Stalinesque reply I received from the BOA relating to the ‘no late applications’ rule.
‘The extraordinary interest and demand from UK media saw the British Olympic Association (BOA) receive more than 3,000 requests for the approximately 400 accreditations available. After careful consideration by the Media Accreditation Committee, we regret to inform you that your application for accreditation for the London 2012 Olympic Games has been unsuccessful. Should we be in the fortunate position to receive additional accreditations from the International Olympic Committee (IOC) as the Games near or if any granted accreditations are returned, we will reallocate them to applicants on our waiting list. You will automatically be put on this list.’
After an on-line protest by over 2,500 black readers who were outraged that The Voice Newspaper – founded in 1982 by Jamaican-born accountant, Val McCalla – were not going to be able to report on the antics of Britain’s brilliant black athletes (who must out number our white winners), a decision was made in July by the BOA reversing the original rejection and granting media accreditation to London 2012. So that’s one example
of BOA changing their mind. But most UK media don’t even make it onto the waiting list.
As the editor of The Voice Newspaper put it even after being given his ‘E’ media pass: ‘Questions must be asked of the Media Accreditation Committee as to what criteria they used to reach the conclusion that The Voice was not worthy of accreditation…what training and knowledge or race relations and equality the members of this committee have…what is the equality break down of the media organisations granted accreditation and rejected and how many UK based black and minority ethnic media organisations have received accreditation’.
The media accreditation mess and the empty seats fiasco are two areas that could have been easily resolved with savvy media skills and leadership. None of which the senior executive members of the BOA ‘Communications’ media team seem to possess; they can’t even reply to professional media emails without resorting to using a form template. Why the Director of the UK ‘Communications’ team is an American is also unclear.
It seems extraordinary that UK media cannot be allowed to report on the Olympics – when there are so many foreign media and VIPs not bothering to show up or use their seats. Apart from anything else, the nature ofthe media business is that the thinking is more about next month than next year. News organisations tend not to know the make-up of their editorial teams two years in advance so one would expect some flexibility – especially to UK based media who have been spending time and resources promoting the Olympics.
According to the Telegraph, excluding the Press Association (who have 90 hacks at the games) , the number of print and photo journalists accredited for Britain’s entire newspaper industry (unlimited access) is just 270 .
Yet the Chinese had around 500 for the Bejing Games. Ironic isn’t ? As The Telegraph’s Olympics editor put it last year, whist taking up this very subject: ‘For a country with limited media freedom the numbers of
accreditations are in line with Britain, which has the most robust competitive media market in the world’.
The shameful mess up of British media accreditation by the TeamGB media and communications team, headed by Miriam Wilkens, is only made worse by the fact that the BOA have allowed the IOA to trample all over them
when it comes to handing out a few ‘scraps’ to the British media, treating us like a provincial cousin. With Britain currently in third in the Olympic rankings – only behind America and China -perhaps Olympics Minister Hugh Robertson or Jeremy Hunt should lobby the IOC that media passes for Rio should be allocated in relation to Golds won. At least the editor of the Wenlock Herald might have a chance of making the cut then for 2116.