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| Olympics, London think of new solutions for 2012 ceremony
LONDON (Reuters) - The ceremonies that open and close the Olympic Games in 2012 will have to involve the entire city of London, not only the main stadium in Stratford in the east of the capital.
He said today the minister for the Olympics Tessa Jowell.
Games are traditionally open and closed in one place, as happened this month in Beijing, where China had appreciation for the futuristic spectacle in the stadium Nido d'Uccello.
"We do not want to try to emulate Beijing," said Jowell in an interview with the Independent newspaper.
"What we want are new ways of thinking about the inauguration ceremony. We want the whole of London is involved, with different parts of London to participate in the ceremony," said the minister.
"The Games in London must be profoundly democratic, with citizens who feel intimately involved."
Jowell is also developing a ticketing system similar to that used for the Grand Slam tennis at Wimbledon, where unused tickets are returned for sale to minimize empty seats.
A criticism of the Beijing Olympics was that too many races were held in front of empty stadiums, forcing organisers to use cheerleaders dressed in yellow to improve the atmosphere and the television pictures spread all over the world.
Most seats were free because our sponsors and other Olympic partners "had not used the tickets allocated to them.
China has spent 43 billion dollars for the Olympics, but the British government is under pressure to keep costs down. London won the nomination for the Games of 2012 with an initial budget of 2.4 billion pounds (2.98 billion euros) but has since risen to 9.3 billion pounds.
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