Organisers hope to raise 15 million pounds from Wenlock and Mandeville mercandise sales
Organisers hope to raise 15 million pounds from Wenlock and Mandeville mercandise sales
The organisers of the Games believe Wenlock, the Olympic mascot, and Mandeville, his Paralympic colleague, will raise at least 15 million pounds (17.4 million euros, 21.6 million dollars) of the 70 million pounds they need to generate from licensed merchandising.
They will adorn everything from toys to mugs when the mascots go on sale from this year's two-year countdown to the Games.
The chairman of the London 2012 organising committee, Sebastian Coe, said on Wednesday he hoped children would come to think of the mascots as 'good friends'.
London 2012 chief executive Paul Deighton said: "For our merchandising programme we anticipate royalties of between 70 million pounds and 80 million pounds.
"Of course the amount the mascot contributes is a function of how many are created and how much people are interested in them. I would not be surprised if we get between 10 and 20 percent."
The only nod to a London landmark in the design of the mascots is the orange lights on their heads, which their creators say are inspired by the "Taxi" sign on the top of British capital's iconic black cabs.
Their names reach back into Olympic and Paralympic history.
Wenlock comes from the village of Much Wenlock in Shropshire, central England, where a multi-sport event was one of the inspirations for the founder of the Olympic movement, Baron Pierre de Coubertin.
Mandeville's name is inspired by Stoke Mandeville, a pioneering British hospital set up to help former soldiers suffering from spinal injuries.
It devised a sports event for the patients which was a forerunner of the Paralympics.
A children's author, Michael Morpurgo, was commissioned to write a story about the mascots, imagining them being created from the last drops of steel left over when the final girder for the Olympic Stadium was cast.
Mascots have been a feature of Olympic Games since Munich 1972, when Waldi, a dachshund, was the symbol of the ill-fated Munich Games at which Israeli athletes and officials were killed by Palestinian extremists.
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