Questions for LOCOG - I

When the UK was preparing its bid to host the 2012 Olympics,

1. Did anyone walk the proposed cross-country course in Greenwich Park with a measuring wheel at bid stage - or was it just a paper exercise?


2. Why did the site plans for Greenwich Park never meet the minimum spec of the FEI?


3. Why does LOCOG think that the FEI would waive the minimum specification for Greenwich when all the other venues - Sydney, Athens and Hong Kong - had had to fulfil the specification?

At the LOCOG exhibition in the Greenwich Park Pavilion Tearooms today, in answer to a question from a visitor about how many spectators would be allowed into the Park to watch the cross-country event, a LOCOG representative answered that "numbers will be severely restricted".


4. what do they mean by "severely restricted" cross-country crowd? 20,000? 15,000? 10,000?

Again, at the Pavilion Tearooms today, Derrick Spurr (Parks Manager, soon to be elevated to "Olympics liaison") demonstrated a depressing ignorance of gravity, velocity and f=ma physics by claiming that a (human) jogger impacts the ground more than a horse weighing a third of a ton (say, 333kg), wearing Olympic studs on its shoes, travelling at 20 miles an hour and carrying a rider.

Special question for O-level Physics students: what is the force with which a 333kg horse lands after jumping a 1.5m fence? You should illustrate your working with a drawing of the displaced ground and grass.