 Who am I? I'm Sebastian Ko. I'm chairman of the Organising Committee for the Olympic and Paralympic Games in London in 2012. I think the Olympics is compelling because of its scale. I think the spirit and the history behind it and the fact that there is no organisation, no gathering political or otherwise that includes 250 countries all under pretty much the same roof at the same time. It is beyond any sporting comparison and in large part beyond any other comparison. The public come to an Olympic Games because they know it's different and they also know that they're not only going to see extraordinary sport. That tends to happen when you have the world's best athletes together competing. But I think they also know they're going to see extraordinary feats physical and mental as well. And there's a massive well of humanity that runs through this and what gathering on equal terms pitches American runners against competitors from Burundi. It's just the breadth of that engagement and I think they understand that they're part of something that is very, very special and only takes place every four years. My earliest recognition of the Games was actually before I'd even thought about competing. I remember the Tokyo Melody that the BBC ran back in 1964 so I was about nine years old then. And then in 1968 it became more profound because we were all marshaled into an assembly hall at my secondary school in Sheffield in an early morning of a late September. And the reason we were in there was to watch the performances highlighted packages but the performances the night before of Sheila Sherwood and John Sherwood, two husband and wife athletes in my home city who got the bronze medal in the four hurdles. John Sherwood and his wife narrowly missed out in the women's long jump and got the silver. And I remember watching this and I couldn't really articulate it any more than the fact that I just instinctively at that moment knew this is what I wanted to do. I then joined the Athletics Club that they were members of. I queued for nearly three hours to wait for them to come back as conquering heroes with their medals. And two years later Sheila gave me the first pair of running spikes I took to an English schools track championship. So the 1968 games I couldn't have properly understood the athletic feats that I was watching but I certainly understood that this was something that was really rather different from anything I'd seen before. It's very difficult to describe an Olympic Games all that experience without sort of winding the clock back a year from the moment that you hear you've got selection. Because that in itself is quite an interesting year. You know that you're probably with a bit of luck and some judgment and hard training going to make the games. But it's training from Olympic Games is a knife edge occupation. You know you're training hour by hour. You're reading the signs of overuse and potential injury. And of course it's not as though you're heading for the average season. You know that in the course of your career there may only be possibly one opportunity to do this and at very best too. And if you're extraordinarily lucky you might be born in the right year to perhaps get three of them. So when I got to Moscow it was actually almost the relief of getting there. Because of course the year before we'd been mired in the political arguments about whether it was appropriate for a British Olympic team to be present at a games in Moscow. Given that the Soviet Union had just only a few months earlier invaded Afghanistan. The world doesn't change that often and in great ways. And so we had quite a difficult political time. And the British Olympic Association as an autonomous body stood firm against the view of the government of the day. And so it wasn't just about managing my first major championship. It was also about managing some of the extraneous events that really were beyond my control. I tried at all times and my coaches tried at all times to keep this simple. That actually this isn't an Olympic Games but it's the same physical principle. You have to start at a point and you have to get across the line ideally before anybody else. And you have to think your way through it and don't let the enormity of the occasion take you down into cul-de-sacs and mentally become blind to the things that you would automatically do without even thinking about it at Crystal Palace or in my case up in Yorkshire or even international events. Don't let the moment get you. It's very much easier said than done because of course in the 800 meters I made probably every cardinal sin it was possible to commit in the space of a minute and 45 seconds and paid a very high price for that. But when you are running on that track you are all the time trying to tell yourself this is no different from how you would approach a race at Crystal Palace. Only you've got President Brezhnev and 100 heads of state sitting in the stadium watching you at the same time. I think having lost the 800 meters and not that I was beaten by Steve Avet and most people think this was my irritation afterwards or my disappointment was solely based on the fact I'd been beaten by Steve. Actually that was irrelevant. I knew on that day I'd actually underperformed. Steve actually is a very good close friend of mine now. I would have been just as disappointed had I been beaten by a German or a Kenyan or an American. It was just that I knew on that day of all days I had underperformed. So pulling the knitting together over the next three days before stepping back onto the track to challenge him again over a distance that he was frankly unbeaten for in nearly 42 outings over that distance actually was probably the best thing to have happened because I just wanted to finish the 1500 meters and not necessarily winning it but knowing that I never wanted to walk off a track feeling as disappointed because I had so underperformed as I did in the 800. And that was my template. I knew that I just wanted to finish that race knowing that if somebody's in front of me it's because they're fitter, younger, faster, mentally more agile. Not that I had sort of fallen 10% short of what I was capable of. I was once asked by a journalist what the difference between sport and politics is and I joked, once joked that the difference, that sport and politics have two great similarities. Firstly, you get injuries in both activities but rarely in sport are they inflicted by your own teammates. So there are, I mean politics is quite a brutal process and I think that the ability to be a self-starter in both activities is really quite key. In sport as in politics there are lots of things that you do by instinct and learning the hard way in sport to come through a system, understand it, understand the processes understand that from time to time you're working with a coach who's going to be supremely critical about what you do and good athletes crave criticism because it makes them better athletes over the course of the coming season. All those things actually I think are quite useful. And sport gives you, the one thing I'm always very grateful about sport is it gave me an insight into life that I probably would not have had for at least another 20 years had I not been involved in sport and the best example of that is by the age of 24 I'd competed in every Iron Curtain country. So when I'm listening to some of my peers at the time talking in abstract about the Cold War and with great certainty I was actually able to sit there and think I've practically experienced what that means to be on that side of the fence and I think there were things that certainly sport gave me that have helped certainly in what I did in politics. I've got many many friends around the world who have come from sport into politics the great mistake actually is to conclude that they've gone into politics as a thought after sport most of us have actually not been actively political but most of us actually had our political commitment forged during our sporting career and maybe because of it. I went to Singapore to pitch to bring the games back to this country the first time in 64 years driven by my Sheffield experience knowing full well that at the age of 12 I was exposed to something which changed the way I just viewed the world and whether that's in art whether it's in sciences whether it's in sport that is what we should as a nation always try to achieve and the opportunity to expose young people specifically in sport to the greatest exponents of their generation in sport in their own backyard I think harness properly can change the way we view sporting participation in this country and also be a fantastic bridgehead into other areas of activity that sport has so consistently accessed in a really profound way I will go to my grave knowing that the most potent social worker in all our communities is sport it's been doing it for a hundred years it will go on doing it for a hundred years I think by having the Olympic and Paralympic Games here we just give a helping hand to all those people that are out there doing this all the time the other legacy that we are determined to pursue is that through the Paralympic Games I think we can genuinely change public attitudes towards disability and the way the public view disability if you look at what Paralympic athletes are doing they're doing something that 99% of the so-called able bodied community can't get within a mile of so I think that already disability is deserving of redefinition I think the Paralympic Games can give that a real practical nudge is it the taking part or is it the winning? I think it's both I think it's both from where I sit now as president of an organizing committee the greatest driver of participation in sport is the well stockshot window the Chris Hoyes, the Kelly Holmes, the Tani Gray-Thompsons who encourage more people by dint of their own herculean efforts into that sport but you also need the structures in place that encourage people just to want to take part and I think that I don't see these things as being mutually exclusive I think they come together in one narrative I'm going to feel very proud of having ridden both bicycles one of the great advantages I have in helping organize a Games is I see it through any number of prisons I've been a working journalist I'm the vice president of the International Federation I've worked in the International Olympic Committee but fundamentally I am a runner I'm born from sport so being able to look at this through the eyes of a former athlete I think makes the Games a better chance of the Games being a better spectacle for the athletes and occasionally when I see old footage it just frankly makes me feel older by the day it sort of carbon dates you really I want the Games to be a shop window for the extraordinary creativity of this country the extraordinary diversity of this country our sporting heritage our broader historical impact on the world I want people to feel proud that we have staged the Games and that we have been given the opportunity to showcase and provide bridgeheads for so many other areas of activity I want more young people involved in all sorts of things that they would never have dreamt of doing had we come back empty handed from Singapore