Around 8.8 million tickets for the Olympics and two million for the Paralympics will now be produced by Weldon, Williams & Lick, based in Fort Smith, Arkansas, a company who specialise in working with major events, including the Olympics.

It means that the tickets will be shipped around 4,500 miles from Arkansas, a state located in the southern region of the United States and the birthplace of former US President Bill Clinton, to the UK.

The deal, which is the UK's biggest single ticket requirement for a sporting event, has been attacked by the Federation of Small Businesses (FSB) who said local businesses had been ignored.

"We are concerned many local businesses are being left out of the loop," said FSB spokesman Matthew Jaffa.

"A significant amount of small businesses were in a position to win the bid but the complexity of the bid process makes it onerous for them to compete."

London 2012 have defended the move, claiming that the American company won the contract in a fair and transparent process.

"The main contract to print and fulfil the majority of tickets for London 2012 was awarded following a thorough, competitive and open procurement process in 2010," a London 2012 spokesperson said.

"The company which won the bid has worked on several previous Games, met all of our criteria around security, scale and budget and has specialist systems in place to manage the complex process of personalising, printing, packaging tickets and integrating security aspects to the scale we require.

"Tickets which are sold after May will be printed in the UK – the printing and fulfilment of these tickets is on a smaller scale, and will be managed in a different way."

Weldon, Williams & Lick has been an industry leader in custom ticket design and event ticket printing for more than 100 years having been founded in 1898 when it started printing circus tickets.

This will be the fourth Olympics that they printed the tickets for, having done Atlanta in 1996 and Sydney four years later, as well as the Winter Games at Vancouver in 2010.


The company claims to live by the motto of Chauncey A. Lick, one of its founders.

"Business goes where it is invited and stays where it is well treated," he said.

"The customer is, after all, the real boss in any business."

But others have been move critical in voicing their displeasure at the decision, including UK Independence Party (UKIP) politician Lawrence Webb, a candidate for Mayor of London.

"This is a kick in the guts to British firms who would have been desperate to secure such a lucrative contract but it looks like they did not even get the opportunity to bid," he said.

"There seems to be a track record in this country of not putting British businesses first.

"We have seen it with Bombardier in Derby and now we are seeing it with the London Olympics where an American company gets the contract to print tickets.

"It is a disgrace."

Tickets have been one of the biggest problems for London 2012 so far, although the issues so far have until now had centred around sales rather than printing.

Last month, it was confirmed that 10,000 too many tickets were sold for the synchronised swimming sessions at the Olympics following a human data error.

There was another computer problem in June last year during the second round of ticket sales when the official website struggled to cope with overwhelming demand and left people unable to access it.

The policy of first round ticket sales also came under fire last year for a perceived lack of transparency in the process after fans had money withdrawn from their account without knowing what events they were seeing.

Contact the writer of this story at [email protected]


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