BBC Staff Outweigh British Athletes at London 2012

There will likely be more accredited BBC staff for this summer’s Olympic Games than competing British athletes.

The broadcaster has supplied 765 passes to staff to cover London 2012, up from the 493 that worked for the Corporation on the Beijing Games.

The official number of athletes selected to compete for Team GB has not been released as yet but estimates put the team at around 550.

BBC director of London 2012 Roger Mosey, writing on his official blog, described the staff number jump as “inevitable” because of the the “massive increase in output – with four times as many TV channels and an extra radio station compared with Beijing, and double the overall number of hours” to be handled by the Corporation.

He also said the hike is down to the “predicted greater level of interest” in the event.

The BBC’s planned coverage already includes 24 digital HD channels, a new, albeit temporary digital radio station and 33 hours a day across the BBC’s bouquet of channels including BBC One, Two, and Three.

Mosey said releasing the staffing levels was part of the BBC’s “commitment to being completely transparent about what we’re up to” ahead of the Games.

“Big events require significant staffing levels,” he said and pointed to U.S. broadcaster NBC which has “used over 2,800 staff at previous Olympics.”

The Times reported that Mosey said: “there were 380 staff working on Sky Sports’ excellent host-broadcasting operation for last year’s Champions League final at Wembley.”

His blog noted that there “was a very strange argument that it’s a problem if the BBC staffing levels are greater than the size of Team GB – as if a Team GB of 1,000 people would then make it OK for us to have 999.”

Mosey said the BBC’s teams “are driven by the scale of the overall coverage, not the number of British athletes competing.”