LegendaryLife Blog

I like seeing statistics about major events, they tend to summarize the level of engineering (physical and mental) involved to pulling them off. Here are a few from the upcoming 2008 Summer Olympic Games in Beijing.

Key Facts (so far)

• comprise of 28 programs encompassing 302 individual events
• 302 gold medals to be awarded
• almost 11 thousand athletes expected to participate in the games
• 21 880 touch bearers will have run 137 thousand kilometers over 130 days before the opening ceremony
• National Stadium (Bird’s Nest) covers an area of 258 thousand square meters
• highest ticket price is 5 thousand Renminbi (650$US) with the lowest being 200 Renminbi (26$US)
• Attendance is expected to exceed half a million internationally and 2.5 million domestic spectators
• over 800 hotels and 4 thousand hostels are providing 420 thousand rooms
• over 5 thousand IT professionals will help information flowing on over 12 thousand computers and two thousand printers
• Beijing 2008 Environment Construction Command Office is proposing 65 laws under five categories regarding keeping pollution down to a minimum during the games including a possible mandatory vacations for entire cities who don’t directly service the venues
• Beijing will demolish over 3.32 square meters of “illegal construction” to improve the aesthetics around the game venues
• smoking is banned at all venues
• Olympic expressways will open on nine Beijing freeways and five co-hosting cities
• China has launched a special zip code specifically for the Olympics in order to have speedy mail service during the games
• Pigs that will be fed to athletes are on a specific organic diet to ensure they are drug free

The Bottom Line

Sounds like fun… looking forward to watching the highlights on TV.

Buzzvia

http://virtualreview.org/china/zoom/348714/beijing-olympic-games-statistics

http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,135974-c,currentevents/article.html