London 2012 Olympics: Locog opens ticket registration website

Locog, the London 2012 organising committee, this morning launched for UK and EU residents interested in buying tickets for the Games, which go on sale next year.

Reigning Olympic women's 400m champion Christine Ohuruogu was among those due to be present at Trafalgar Square for a media event to mark the launch and the first day of London becoming the next Olympic and Paralympic host city, following the closing ceremony of the Vancouver 2010 Winter Paralympic Games last night.

The ticket registration site tells its users that "they will be among the first to hear about ticketing news and other exciting events and offers" although signing up does not give users any head start in the application process.

Locog will be hoping that the launch helps begin to appease the London Assmebly, which last week issued a list of 18 hard-hitting questions amid demands for transparency and affordability in the ticketing strategy.

While London bidders promised a range of tickets at less than £30, there have been recent indications from Locog that that price barrier is too low to meet a £441 million ticketing revenue target.

The Assembly submission called for specific details about price, the availability of tickets, whether there will be any priority access and the purchasing arrangements.

Women's boxing at the London 2012 Olympics: raging belle

On a chilly winter morning, just before dawn, a young woman dressed in a black tracksuit runs hard along the seafront of her home town. She shadowboxes as she runs – seven miles around the picturesque coastal town of Bray in Co Wicklow. Over the past six years this morning workout has been a daily ritual for Katie Taylor, the two-time and current amateur lightweight world boxing champion. It is part of a gruelling regime that she hopes will help her achieve her ultimate goal: to become the first woman to win an Olympic gold medal at boxing.
The London Games in 2012 will be the first time women have been allowed to compete in this most visceral of sports at Olympic level. Last August the International Olympic Committee (IOC) decreed that 36 places would be available in London to the world’s elite female fighters, who would compete across three weight classes: flyweight (48-51kg), lightweight (56-60kg) and middleweight (69-75kg).

Taylor knows that women’s boxing is a mystery to the majority of sports fans, but is certain that is about to change. 'People will be shocked by the standard of the sport at London 2012,’ she tells me after her run. 'We’ve been invisible up until now. I think if I had achieved what I’ve achieved and I was a man, I’d have got much more recognition. Hopefully, more recognition will come with the Olympics.’

She certainly has recognition within her own sport – other female boxers talk about Katie Taylor with awe. She is supremely skilful and has lightning reflexes. 'I like to sit in the pocket [boxing speak for fighting at close range], to fight on the inside,’ she says. 'I do like a bit of a war.’ Her hero is Sugar Ray Leonard, the flamboyant American champion of the 1980s.

Eloquent and attractive, Taylor, 23, is a promoter’s dream, tipped to be one of the stars of the 2012 Games, and the athlete who can lead women’s boxing into the mainstream. Like many of her fellow fighters, she is an all-round sports enthusiast, and has also represented Ireland at football. She started boxing at the age of 10 – one day, when it was raining too heavily to play football, her father took her to the local boxing gym instead; she was a natural. Thirteen years later, she wants to repay her father, Peter, a former amateur light-heavyweight champion of Ireland and now her trainer. 'He’s sacrificed so much to work with me full-time,’ she says. 'I wouldn’t be where I am now without him.’