London 2012 - The Pin Badge Perspective Quiz

Answer: LOCOG

The committee was founded in October 2005, just 3 months after London won the games in a close-run contest with Paris. The committee was chaired by Lord Sebastian Coe, the man in charge of the British Olympic bid. Other notable members were Her Royal Highness The Princess Royal and the Vice Chairman Sir Keith Mills.

LOCOG were not responsible for the construction of the new venues; this fell to the Olympic Delivery Authority (ODA), who were fully publicly funded. LOCOG made a profit of around £30 million over the course of the games.

Answer: 2,012

It seems a lot doesn't it? Two thousand and twelve different badges were made for the games, with edition sizes ranging from over a million to less than 1,000 produced. No previous Olympic Games has had pin production on this scale, although pin collecting has been a tradition for many Olympics. Enthusiasts often wear caps or lanyards with the pins that they are willing to trade on display.

Answer: Wolff Olins

Wally Olins is actually one of the founders of the brand consultancy firm Wolff Olins, along with the designer Michael Wolff. The company began in Camden, London in 1965 but now have offices in New York and Dubai as well as their home town. In 2012, the company were recognised by the Sunday Times as one of the best small businesses to work for in the UK.

Recently Wolff Olins have worked with huge companies such as General Electric, Unilever, PricewaterhouseCoopers, as well as designing the current logo for the Tate, the institution responsible for a huge collection of art in the United Kingdom. They have galleries in London, Liverpool, and St Ives.

Answer: Beijing

There are nine handover badges in total, including four stamps and two busses (one Olympic and one Paralympic). The other three badges are numbers eight, nine and sixteen in the catalogue. There are also two handover badges depicting the 2010 Winter Games in Vancouver, and one badge with the banner 'See you in Rio', the host of the subsequent Summer Games in 2016.

Answer: Central Park

The other parks in the collection are Greenwich Park, Kensington Gardens, Regent's Park, Richmond Park and St James' Park. The largest in Richmond Park, occupying almost 1000 hectares of land in South West London. The smallest is the 19 hectare Green Park, located between Hyde Park and St James' Park and directly adjacent to Buckingham Palace.

The badges themselves each display something distinctive to each park, as well as the name. For example, the badge of Kensington Gardens features a silhouette of the Albert Memorial.

Central Park is found in New York City.

Answer: Chelsea Bridge

Despite being first suggested in the 1840s, the bridge did not open until 1857 as a result of money being instead directed to the Chelsea Embankment. From 1857 until 1935 the bridge was called the Victoria Bridge (now referred to as the Old Chelsea Bridge), but since its reconstruction in the 1930s it has been known by its current name.

The other 5 bridges included in the pin badge set are Albert Bridge, Westminster Bridge, Waterloo Bridge, Millennium Bridge and Tower Bridge.

Answer: 1

Although they may just look like a pair of lost aliens, there is a lot of meaning in the way they both look, as well as in their names. Wenlock is named after the Shropshire town of Much Wenlock, where the Wenlock Olympian Society held its first Olympian Games in 1850. These are considered to be the precursor games to the modern Olympics, which first took place in Athens in 1896. Mandeville is named for Stoke Mandeville Hospital in Buckinghamshire. In 1948 they held the first Stoke Mandeville Games, which are now considered to be the forerunner of the modern Paralympic Games.

Wenlock wears five rings on his wrists, symbolising the Olympic rings, and the three spikes on his head represent the three places on a podium. The eyes of the mascots are supposedly cameras, and the yellow lights on their heads are representative of a London taxi.

Despite generally positive reviews, one reviewer said that they looked like the result of "a drunken one night stand between a Teletubby and a Dalek". Try looking at them in the same way again!

Answer: Rainbow

The reason that there are four badges is because they feature four different colours of the logo. There is one with a blue logo, one pink, one paralympic logo and one union jack logo.

The term LGBT has been in use since the 1990s, having developed from LGB, which in turn replaced 'the gay community' in the mid-1980s as many people felt that this didn't fully represent the people it was describing.

Answer: Fishing

Although ridiculous events like the Tug of War existed in the games of earlier Olympiads, fishing has never quite made the bill. There have been several calls for it to be included in the Winter Olympic program but that seems unlikely to ever occur.

Synchronised swimming has featured in every Summer Olympic Games up to London since its first appearance in Los Angeles in 1984. Although there have been canoeing events since the 1936 games in Berlin, canoe slalom didn't make its debut until the 1972 games in Munich. It then had a 20 year hiatus before returning at Barcelona. Surprisingly, water polo has been at every Summer Olympic Games since 1900.

Answer: Danny Boyle

The Opening Ceremony took place on the 27th of July and took the form of a brief history of Britain. It featured excellent performances from famous faces such as Shakespearean actor Kenneth Branagh who took on the role of the figurehead of the Industrial Revolution, Isambard Kingdom Brunel.

However, the ceremony wasn't without comedy. Comedic actor Rowan Atkinson sat bored at a keyboard while playing the same note during Vangelis' "Chariots of Fire", while HRH The Queen appeared to enter from a helicopter with none other than James Bond himself.