More than 27,000 cyclists are taking part in the 54-mile London to Brighton bike ride in aid of the British Heart Foundation.
Riders set off from Clapham Common from 06:00 BST, with the first arriving at the finish just before 09:00.
The toughest part of the ride is the climb up 813ft (247m) Ditchling Beacon just outside Brighton, which takes an average of 15 minutes to scale.
The event, which is now in its 37th year, has raised more than £50m.
Among the riders taking part was Toby Field from Eastbourne, also known as the Fat Cycle Rider, who has lost 8st 14lb in weight since taking up cycling.
His father died from a weight-related heart attack at the age of 55, and Mr Field said after his father's death he was in denial about his own health problems.
"I wanted a cheap bike so I could ride around the park with my kids. I was walking and they were leaving me behind. That's where it all started."
Road closures have been in place along the route out of London, through the boroughs of Reigate and Banstead and Tandridge in Surrey and through Sussex into Brighton.
Southern Railway and First Capital Connect do not allow bikes to be carried on trains on race day, but a park and ride service operates between Brighton Racecourse and Madeira Drive.
Bus services have been redirected and Brighton and Hove Bus and Coach company said the A23 into Brighton was gridlocked at about midday because of the race.
Source: www.bbc.co.uk
London 2012 Olympics: new Games ticket resale scandal is old problem - Daily Telegraph
But the NOCs often hold back significant swathes of tickets for their own use, to sell to sponsors, provide to athletes families or, in some cases, to earn some cash under the table by selling on to others at highly inflated prices.
They are able to do this because the numbers of tickets made available to each national Olympic committee is never made public. In the past some authorised ticket resellers who have the rights to sell tickets in multiple countries have boasted of being able to surreptitiously swap tickets between countries. So countries with a strong interest in one sport can get tickets allocated to another country.
Only last month did Volodymyr Gerashchenko, the 66-year-old general secretary of Ukraine National Olympic Committee, step down after he was secretly filmed by a BBC investigation team offering to sell up to one hundred tickets worth thousands of pounds for events at the Games.
Locog chief executive Paul Deighton has also been strict about the clear lines of demarcation between authorised ticket sellers who are also official hospitality providers. Technically pools of tickets for one particular client group shouldn't be mixed with tickets for a different group. Nor should hotels or extras be added to ticket sales to artificially inflate prices.
But the wheeling and dealing of tickets around the globe occurs under the cloak of commercial confidentiality. Both Locog and the IOC refuse to release details as to how many tickets each national Olympic committee receives.
Nor do they release how many tickets the hospitality providers have purchased. If they did, buyers in each country would have a fairer idea of the ticket process. The method of calculating each country's allocation would also be scrutinised. But as we have seen with the refusal of Locog to even reveal how many tickets have been available at each session to the UK public, transparency and accountability are not high on the list of priorities.
Source: www.telegraph.co.uk
London 2012: Tasha Danvers gives up dream of competing at Olympics - The Guardian
Britain's Tasha Danvers, the bronze medallist in the 400m hurdles at the Beijing Olympics, has retired after conceding defeat in her battle to be fit for the London 2012 Games. The 34-year-old has suffered a series of injuries and ahead of the preliminary squad announcement for the Games this week Danvers, from south London, has quit.
"It's extremely disappointing not to be able to put myself into contention for selection for London 2012," she said. "Based on my training at different stages my coach and I believed we had a genuine chance of making it. But the setbacks have been too many to overcome.
"Since winning Olympic bronze in Beijing I have made so many sacrifices to fulfil my dream of competing in London. Making the decision to relocate back to the UK meant leaving my seven-year-old son behind in America, which is the hardest thing in the world to do. But we genuinely believed I could step on to that podium again and with the support of my family, [coach] Malcolm Arnold, UKA, the medical team and the National Lottery, I've done everything possible to try to achieve that. Sadly my body has had enough."
Danvers, who also won Commonwealth Games silver in 2006 – less than 18 months after giving birth to her son – has made every final she has contested since 2004.
Arnold said: "This is the worse possible news for Tasha but there is no doubt she has thrown everything at trying to make London. She is an Olympic medallist and that pedigree doesn't just disappear. I was confident that if we could get her to the Games she would have been very competitive.
"This is the flipside of the Olympic dream but career-ending injuries are a fact of life at this level of sport. Our medical team have worked incredibly hard but sometimes the body knows best."
Great Britain's head coach Charles van Commenee added: "We don't have too many current Olympic medallists in our team and in an ideal world they would all be with us in London. Tasha knows what it takes to be competitive and make the podium, which would have been a huge advantage. Retirement is a hard decision for any athlete but when the decision is taken out of your hands so close to an Olympic Games, it must be even tougher. I wish Tasha all the very best."
Source: www.guardian.co.uk
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