Yesterday we launched the Gold Challenge www.goldchallenge.org – a new charity challenge with the aim to complete as many Olympic and Paralympic sports as you can by the end of 2012 – after 18 months of often manically hard work.

I hadn't been closely involved with the detail of the event and it was fantastic to walk into the enormous nursery pavilion at Lords and see how the event team had managed to bring the Gold Challenge to life.

We had Olympians and Paralympians demonstrating their sports and giving the 500 attendees the chance to try fencing, judo, canoeing, table-tennis, boxing and archery.

It was great to see enthusiastic people queuing up to have a go on all the sports – everyone really embraced it and particularly enjoyed fighting colleagues and friends on the fencing piste or learning how to throw someone in judo!

The Gold Challenge is part of the official mass participation legacy program for London 2012 and Hugh Robertson, Minister for Sport and the Olympics, Jennie Price, chief executive officer of Sport England, and Andy Hunt, chief executive officer of the British Olympic Association, all gave excellent speeches.

We also had about 100 of our charity partners in attendance. It was great to see so many of them and to talk to their corporate partners. Corporate partnerships are key to charities and we're excited to think that the Gold Challenge is going to be central to many corporate employee engagement programs over the next couple of years.


The only low point was losing at fencing to Konnie Huq (pictured) – which was, of course, entirely due to Chris Hollins' questionable scoring!

All in all a great day and I owe huge thanks to everyone involved in making it such a success.

Dan Thompson is the founder and chief executive of Gold Challenge.