Via the Independent:

Even Michael Payne, the “father of Olympic branding”, believes that the fiercely-enforced exclusivity rights agreed to by the Blair government (the legacy keeps taking) has gone too far:

London 2012 organisers have, he says, applied these exclusivity rights far more aggressively than in previous Games, to the point where it is bad news even for the sponsors themselves. “I have said to Locog and to the IOC, ‘I think you’re scoring an own goal here.’ If I were a sponsor I would be saying to the IOC after the closing ceremony: ‘Were the rules allowed to be applied so strictly that is has come back to bite us?’ There is no question in my view that the controls and protections have gone too far when it is starting to suffocate local street traders and I don’t think that is necessarily what the Olympic sponsors are looking for.
“The public do get it. They do understand that Coca-Cola has paid, Pepsi hasn’t, so Coca-Cola should be entitled to provide the soft drinks, but what’s that got to do with a flaming torch baguette in a café?”
As the world’s media descend on London for the Games, several international outlets have pointed out that London does not seem in a party mood. And it’s not only down to the weather. For the Diamond Jubilee the streets and shop windows were covered in Union Jacks, Will and Kate mugs, tea towels and the like. This time round “you don’t see any references to the Games in shop windows or on the streets – people are too scared”, one small business owner was reported as saying by The New York Times…
Stories of the overzealous behaviour of the Locog’s brand-protection team have dogged the torch relay and created much ill feeling towards the Games. In Plymouth a café was told to take its “flaming torch breakfast baguette” off the menu. A florist in Stoke-on-Trent was told to remove an Olympic rings window display made from tissue paper, or risk a £20,000 fine, under laws set out in the Olympic Games Act of 2006.
Yesterday, Evan Davis, presenter of the BBC Radio 4 Today programme, challenged Lord Coe, the Olympics supremo, on whether he would be allowed to turn up to an event in a Pepsi T-shirt. Lord Coe told him: “No, you probably wouldn’t be walking in with a Pepsi T-shirt because Coca-Cola are our sponsors and they have put millions of pounds into this project but also millions of pounds into grassroots sport.

In fact he was wrong about that (the T-shirt would be fine), but Coe’s focus on Coca Cola’s investment (I wonder what the return to shareholders on that will really be) is telling. Of the billions “contributed” by British taxpayers to pay for this spectacle (massively above the original budget, incidentally and inevitably), Coe, an arrogant specimen even by the standards of the Olympic blazerati (not my word, alas) had nothing to say.

On a happier note, the Daily Mail has a selection of photos from the last (and rather cheaper) London Olympics, those of 1948. A different world.