2012 is a big year for a whole host of reasons. Here is just one of them – the Olympics are coming to London!
It’s the world’s largest sporting event, without question. Yet without insurance and risk management, it couldn’t take place.
In fact, we expect that the insurance coverage for London 2012 will exceed £10bn.
Risk, the Olympics and London have come together before. The games in 1908 were due to be held in Rome, but Mount Vesuvius erupted and devastated Naples, which pulled funds away from the Italian coffers. London in effect stepped in.
Fast forward 104 years and we have much larger games, and a larger set of risks. For example:
What happens if the London Underground breaks down and passengers can’tget to the stadia?
What happens if there is terrible weather and the events can’t take place on aparticular day, or perhaps the images can’t be beamed around the world?
What happens if there is a terrorist attack?
What happens if an athlete gets injured and has to retire not just from the2012 Olympic games, but from sport altogether?
All of these questions are managed by experts working in insurance. Underwriters work out how much to accept a risk for, and brokers work for their clients to get their risks covered. There will have been many, many negotiations taking place this year and last year to get all the London 2012 risks covered.
If something goes wrong, the claims and loss adjusting experts will be there to put things right as quickly as possible.
Individual athletes have their own policies – if you think about it, athletes are in effect running their own business (their body) so they need to have insurance in case something goes wrong.
Let’s extend the idea of a sportsperson’s body as a business and look at Troy Polumalu, an American footballer whose hair is insured for £1m! Why? His is a brand ambassador for a famous shampoo company and, without his enormous hair, he wouldn’t have won the contract. That insurance policy was, interestingly, written in London – the world’s leading market for these ‘special risks’.
Careers in insurance and risk can start without having to go to university. Apprenticeships in Providing Financial Services include a professional qualification from the CII, the world’s largest professional body for the sector. It could be your first step to earning a seven-figure salary!
Click here to find out more about this amazing profession
