News outlets have been planning for months, if not years, for the moment when the Olympic hosting spotlight would fall on the UK.
With the Olympic flame arriving on UK soil earlier this year, digital publishers have been busy producing numerous interactive features and projects to help audiences uncover more detail about a range of Olympic-related topics, such as the torch relay, the Olympic Park, the athletes taking part and much more.
Here is a list of just 16 examples of interactive features which have been produced by UK news outlets in the run up to the Olympics; from interactive maps collecting multimedia snippets of the torch relay and virtual tours of the Olympic Park, to fact-packed guides to the sports and athletes and personalised interactives letting the user pitch themselves against sporting champions.
- Mapping the torch relay
Channel 4 News says: "Are you carrying the Olympic torch? Do you have a tale to tell or a tweet to share? Use our map to chart the journey of the flame around the UK."
The map interactive includes clickable links to extra multimedia content taken at the specified location along the relay route, such as images and video, including those shared on Twitter using the hashtag #torchtales.
#torchreporter, KM Group
The KM Group set up a crowdsourcing project using the hashtag #torchreporter and asked readers to tweet text, photos and video using the hashtag and including the postcode they were watching the torch relay from.
Using ScraperWiki the team then pulled together those tweets and plotted them on a Google Map of Kent. Over the four days the flame was travelling through Kent the KM's #torchreporter project received around 170 to 180 tweets.
Olympic torch relay map, BBC
The BBC says: "Explore our map to find out where the torch is going each day or check the text version to see a list of locations."
This map interactive enables the user to explore each day of the relay and discover the route in detail.
- Bringing the stage to life
The Guardian says: "Fly through the 2012 Olympic Park and explore the main venues using our immersive photographic tour."
Users can click their way around the Olympic Park, either clicking on each venue to view 360 degree panoramas or staying on the aerial view. By clicking on the blue play boxes users will be taken to further content, such as photos, videos and more interactives.
The Guardian has also produced another interactive to "explore the Olympic Park", featuring 360 degree panoramic interior images.
Interactive venue guide, Telegraph
With this venue guide users can click around the Olympic Park to find out more about each venue and which events will take place there, or take a wider view of all UK venues being used during the Olympics.
London Olympics 2012 - Venues & Live travel, Newsquest Digital Media
Newsquest Digital Media has produced a live map which not only plots images of each Olympic venue, but can also be used to follow live updates on traffic and travel using Transport for London data, including the availability of cycle hire and footage from live traffic cameras
- Facts and figures to the games and athletes
This interactive offers users a one-stop-shop for learning about the Olympic sports due to take place. By clicking on a sport the user can then flick through screens showing visual and text information on details such as the competition area, the equipment, and the rules or moves involved.
An interactive guide to the Games (paywall), the Times
Users can select each sport from the top panel and can then toggle between the graphic explaining more about the sport, and an 'about' tab which offers information on the venue, competitors to watch and who the Great British hopeful is.
What's the real price of the Olympic games? Guardian Datablog
The Guardian says: "Where is the Olympics money coming from - and where's it being spent? How much is coming from sponsorship - and how much does the Olympic stadium cost?"
This Guardian visualisation is to be found on its Datablog. Users can click on the coloured bubbles to achieve further breakdowns of the maths, as well as jump between spending and funding data.
Timeline: Olympics Powers, BBC Sport
The BBC says: "Click through the Olympic Powers timeline to discover key facts, political events and personalities that have defined the history of sport since the first modern Olympiad in 1896."
This interactive was originally built by the World Service and reversioned for BBC Sport. Development editor for the BBC World Service Dmitry Shishkin previously told Journalism.co.uk the interactive is "a clickable guide of all the Olympic Games starting from 1896 to Beijing". Users can view visualisations showing which medals were won by which country for each of the games.
Virtual medal table (paywall), the Times
The Times says: "The virtual medal table is the form guide that The Times has been running, in association with Infostrada Sports, the Dutch sports stats company, for nearly two years. In that time, we have been hoovering up every single result in every significant event in all the Olympic sports and this has allowed us to know which athletes, on form, are in position to win Olympic medals."
Users can manipulate the fields of each available table to assess performance by medal type, sports, events and gender.
Olympic bodies, Guardian
The Guardian says: "31 British athletes reveal what it takes to build an Olympic body on the eve of London 2012."
The interactive enables users to scroll through a line-up of the British athletes, who change position when hovered over. This also reveals information about that athlete and then by clicking on an athlete the user is played a video featuring their selected sports person.
Where in the UK do our athletes come from? Channel 4 News
Channel 4 News says: "Great Britain is sending 542 athletes to this year's Olympic Games, each of whom have spent years training and sweating it out to prove their potential to win a medal for their country. But research from Channel 4 News, analysing where each of Britain's Olympic athletes were born shows a significant disparity across the UK."
Channel 4 News uses an interactive heat map, which enables users to drill down further into specific areas of the UK, to visualise its research findings.
- The personal touch
The Guardian says: "See how your personal best in the 100m, 10km, 100m freestyle swim and bicycle road race compares against the all-time greats - and whether your time would have ever earned you a place on the podium".
This interactive from the Guardian enables users to enter their own sporting achievements and compare them to professional athletes. There is an additional sharing element with users encouraged to post their results on Facebook, and use the Guardian's Facebook app to unlock more features. Journalism.co.uk reports more on the interactive here and the Guardian also has more on how it was built.
Athletes Like You, BBC World Service
This interactive from the BBC World Service enables users to enter their height and weight and be compared to Beijing medal winners. The interactive, which Journalism.co.uk reports more on here, has been re-versioned 15 times for different languages.
- This is just a selection of the interactive work at UK news outlets for the Olympics - share links to more examples with us in the comments below
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