When our athletes march out into the Olympic stadium in July, they will be one of the largest British squads ever at the Games.
Apart from the BBC’s team that is.
The army of Corporation staff being sent to broadcast at London 2012 easily outnumbers the competitors on Team GB.
In fact 765 BBC staff will be at the sporting spectacular, compared with the 550 athletes on the British team.
The staffing levels mark a 55 per cent increase on the number sent to cover the Beijing Olympics four years ago, when 493 staff recorded all the drama and glory.
Nearly a quarter of the BBC’s sports staff in Salford – around 175 people – will be sent to London for the Games, with the broadcaster paying for their accommodation.
The corporation has defended staffing levels for the Games, pointing out it will be showing 2,500 hours of live sport across TV, radio and online, including daily live TV broadcasts on BBC1, BBC2 and BBC3.
Roger Mosey, the BBC’s Director of London 2012 (They have a director for everything!), said the corporation would have 24 live high-definition channels covering every event and the first-ever 3D broadcasts of the Olympics.
There will also be coverage across Radio 5 Live, including a temporary digital radio service dedicated to the Games.
Writing on his blog, Mr Mosey claimed the increase in staff was inevitable because of the ‘massive increase in output’, with four times as many TV channels involved compared with the Beijing Games.
Mr Mosey pointed to the American broadcaster NBC which had sent more than 2,800 staff to previous Olympics and reports that Sky Sports used 380 staff as host broadcaster for last year’s Champions League final at Wembley (Not with public money though unlike the BBC).
He also dismissed measuring the number of BBC staff against British competitors.
He said: ‘There’s also the very strange argument that it’s a problem if the BBC staffing levels are greater than the size of Team GB – as if a Team GB of 1,000 people would then make it OK for us to have 999.
‘In fact, we have to cover all the nations taking part in the Olympics; and our teams are driven by the scale of the overall coverage, not the number of British athletes competing.’
The BBC boss added: ‘At every stage of the BBC 2012 operation, we’ve been conscious of the need to run as efficient an operation as we can do and to spend our budget wisely.
‘But equally we know that British audiences expect us to cover these Games well, and it’s a once-in-a-lifetime moment for this country where the broadcasting will be required to live up to the event.’