London Games tickets flown in from 'Wild West' US state

Weldon, Williams & Lick, based in the "Wild West" town of Fort Smith in Arkansas, landed what is thought to be the UK's biggest single ticket order for a sports event. Games organisers today came under fire over the "golden deal" to produce 11 million Olympics and Paralympics tickets.

The 16-ton consignment will be air-freighted 4,500 miles from Fort Smith, which features in the Coen Brothers' film True Grit, to a warehouse in Britain in a huge security operation. The tickets will be then be posted at a cost of £6 per order to arrive at UK addresses in June.

British business demanded to know why they were not offered the contract. Previous games in Seoul and Barcelona
gave the deal to their national equivalent of the Royal Mint. Games organisers, who have come under fire for sourcing much of its £1 billion worth of merchandise from the Far East, insisted that the Games remained good business for home-grown firms.

But Tony Hallet, account manager at CCS McLays, one of the UK's leading print brokers, said he did not believe any UK companies had been asked to pitch for the contract. "It is typical of our country. The Yanks would never give it to us, or if the Olympics were in France, UK companies would not get the contract."

He added that a contract for the tickets was "not a problem at all" for CCS McLays, who until recently held the contract for events at the Millennium Stadium in Cardiff.

Liz Brewer, from Integrity, one of the country's leading print companies which has provided tickets for Premiership football matches and major rugby matches across the UK, said they had been asked to print other forms for London 2012, but not tickets.

A London 2012 spokesman said: "The contract to print tickets was awarded following a thorough, competitive and open tender run through Compete For (tendering website).

"As with all of our contracts, a number of criteria are considered including the experience of working on projects of this scale, security, ability to handle large amounts of data and value for money. Across the project, the Games has been good news for UK plc with 95 per cent of contracts going to British business."

Locog said a minority of tickets would be produced in the UK though it was unable to say how many. Among Weldon, Williams & Lick's clients is US-owned Ticketmaster, the agency which runs the London 2012's erratic ticket sales website. It also produced tickets for the Olympics in Atlanta, Sydney and Vancouver.

Arkansas

Johnny Cash, Billy Bob Thornton and General Douglas MacArthur are among a host of notable "alumni" of Arkansas, as well as Bill Clinton who served as Arkansas Governor for 12 years.

Arkansas contains more than 600,000 acres of lakes and 9,700 miles of streams and rivers.
Supermarket chain Wal-Mart was founded in Arkansas by Sam Walton.

Stratford

Home to the world's biggest McDonald's, with 470 staff expected to serve around 50,000 Big Macs and 100,000 portions of fries during the Games.

Houses Westfield shopping centre, one of the largest urban shopping centres in Europe with 1,883,700 square feet.

The promotional film for the Beatles' Penny Lane single was filmed in and around Angel Lane.