PROGRAMME MANAGER:AS HOST nation, Great Britain will have the biggest team in the Olympic Games and is the only competing country with athletes in every Olympic discipline.
The person charged with ensuring it all runs smoothly for the 542 competitors in Team GB is a 30-year-old Irishwoman, Kate O’Sullivan.
Originally from Donnybrook in Dublin, O’Sullivan is the programme manager for the British Olympic Association (BOA) and for Team GB.
She is in charge of 65 different projects, overseeing everything from accreditation and transport to the running of Team GB House on the fringes of Olympic Park, the centre of operations for British athletes and backroom staff during the games.
The logistics are mind-boggling. Each British athlete receives 67 pieces of made-to-measure Adidas kit and 18 pieces from Next, the official team suppliers.
O’Sullivan also handles media for Team GB, a role she does with considerable fluency and reassurance given the understandable trepidation of the organisers have in the face of such a massive event. Even though it is a home Olympics, Team GB will do well to surpass the achievements of Beijing, where British athletes won 47 medals, including 19 golds. The hope this time, she says, is that Team GB will win gold in the country’s strongest events – cycling, rowing, athletics and swimming – and pick up medals across the other disciplines. First, though, they have to turn up.
“My job is to make sure that it all fits together in one picture, that everybody is in the right place at the right time doing the right thing,” she says.
“The athlete’s job is to perform. We have to ensure that all they have to think about is performing. We’re the team behind the team.”
O’Sullivan has had a meteoric rise since leaving TCD in 2004 with a degree in business, economics and social studies.
Her involvement with the Olympics began when she joined Deloitte immediately after university. Deloitte is a sponsor of the 2012 Olympics and through the company she got seconded to the London Organising Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games for a year. From that she was seconded to the British Olympic Association and was appointed programme director in 2009.
“It is so exciting and it is such a privilege to be part of a ‘home team’. Ireland is never going to have an Olympic Games. To be able to be so close to home and to be part of a home nation is just phenomenal,” she says.
She confesses to getting a lot of good-natured stick from her Irish friends about having such a prominent role in Team GB. “The team is made up of so many people of different countries,” she says.
Through the public ballot she got tickets for the women’s lightweight boxing final which, with a bit of luck, will feature our best medal hope, Katie Taylor.
