THE FRENZY has only kicked off in earnest in recent days but, for RTÉ, the countdown to London 2012 started two years ago, says group head of sport Ryle Nugent.

Some 225 hours of Olympic television coverage on RTÉ Two – with a total of 2,300 hours across TV, radio and online – begin tomorrow. RTÉ is sending 45 staff to London to cover the games, while there will be about 100 staff working on Olympic coverage in RTÉ’s Montrose studios, including 24 pundits. The Olympic production centre will be a 16-hour operation, from 7am to 11pm.

“I tend to stay out of the way unless I’m needed,” says Nugent, who describes the Olympics as “a very different beast to anything else we do in sport”.

Unlike major football championships, where much of the production legwork is done by the host broadcaster, there are 24 available HD feeds from London, 12 of which will be received by RTÉ at any one time and made available to website and mobile users.

“You are pretty much running 24 world championships simultaneously,” says Nugent.

At his first Olympics, Atlanta 1996, there were just six available feeds, while RTÉ’s first Olympics, the 1956 Melbourne games, predated the advent of Irish television and so was a radio-only affair.

The Irish Olympic team in 2012 is the most diverse yet, prompting RTÉ to hire new pundits for sports such as gymnastics and the modern pentathlon, in which Irish competitors are participating for the first time.

“It’s important for us to contextualise their achievements,” says Mark McKenna, one of two Dublin-based executive producers of RTÉ’s coverage.

“For some athletes, the achievement is getting to the Olympics; for others, obviously we’re thinking of Katie Taylor, they’re looking for much more. And then there are the vagaries of the draw,” he says, citing badminton player Scott Evans’s first-round match against the reigning Olympic champion, China’s Lin Dan.

“I mean, this is a guy who plays badminton in football stadiums in his home country. It’s important that we convey that this is no different to the Ireland football team playing Spain.”

The broadcaster has “got to hit the ground running”, with Irish competitors active in eight sports on the first day, including Daniel Martin and Nicolas Roche in road racing, Kieran Behan in gymnastics and Lisa Kearney in judo.

“So we’ll learn a lot on the first morning,” says McKenna.

He describes the “nightmare scenario” as two Irish athletes competing for medals at the same time.

The undisclosed cost of broadcasting both London 2012 and Euro 2012 comes out of RTÉ’s special events budget rather than the sport department’s kitty. Though some expenses, such as satellite links, won’t be finalised until later, the event is expected to cost less than Beijing.

Being in the same time zone helps, while for the first time at an Olympics, RTÉ has a dedicated berth overlooking the Olympic Park, so viewers can expect live segments with impressive backdrops.

“It’s something we’re very excited about but also something we’re a bit nervous about,” says Nugent of the event as a whole.

“If we get that gold medal moment, it will be wonderful.”