You've got to hand it to London 2012: hitting their £700 million ($1.1 billion/€801 billion) sponsorship target, as the Games organiser this week announced it had, is truly no mean feat, given the background economic conditions it has had to contend with.

Never in their wildest nightmares – well, conceivably in their very worst nightmares but only the very worst - would Lord Coe and his team have foreseen when they won sport's biggest prize in Singapore in 2005 the sheer extent of the malaise that has overtaken the British economy.

They simply would not have made it had they not been fast out of the blocks, signing up Lloyds, their first top-level sponsor, as early as March 2007.

A sluggish start would have left them scrabbling around, right about now, for new sources of income – or swingeing cost cuts – to fill the hole in their budget.

Instead, they have been able to place £70 million ($111 million/€81 million) on deposit with their oldest partner and expect to be in a positive net cash position through to next September.

I well remember being struck in May 2006, while preparing to interview London 2012 chief executive Paul Deighton, by the scepticism of some sponsorship experts when asked about the likelihood of London 2012 hitting its target.

"[The market] probably has to double in size between now and 2012 to meet the various demands of the London Olympics, the national performance for the Olympics and the Government's other ambitions for attracting sponsorship money into sport," one told me.

"That doesn't mean it's impossible, but it does mean it's a very big ask.

"And it does require a healthy economy over the next few years.

"The sponsorship market can be quite susceptible to economic downturns."

Well, the Government's other ambitions for attracting sponsorship money have had to be reworked, but this has not, to put it mildly, been a healthy economy.

So well done them.

But – and it's quite a big "but" in the context of the race for the 2020 Games which has just got under way – London 2012's sterling efforts do rather underline why the BRICs and similar fast-developing economies such as South Korea – have become such tempting locations for the organisers of sports mega-events.

London has had to pull out all the stops to get to £700 million (($1.1 billion/€801 billion).

Westfield, the shopping-centre group, which tipped them over the edge, will be their 44th domestic sponsor.

Add on the International Olympic Committee's TOP sponsors and you have more than 50 companies seeking to make marketing mileage out of one event, albeit the ultimate mega-event.

That could end up being rather cacophonous.

And, remember, the Olympics has a "clean venue" policy.

Compare this situation with Rio, the next host of a Summer Games after London, and you see the Brazilian city has raised $648 million (£408 million/$475 million) of its $1.2 billion (£755 million/€878 million) domestic sponsorship target from just two deals.

The 2016 Organising Committee, in particular, signed a deal of more than $320 million (£202 million/€234 million) with Brazilian bank Bradesco which dwarfs the estimated £80 million (£127 million/€93 million) paid by Lloyds to London 2012.


Rio 2016 chief executive Leo Gryner, indeed, has sought to make a virtue of this "big deal" approach, suggesting that the city will strive to hit its target while striking the minimum amount of deals necessary.

As for Sochi, host of the 2014 Games, they have already distinguished themselves by securing over $1 billion in sponsorship (£629 million/€732 million) – and that was before they signed up Microsoft as an official supplier.

Such figures are simply unheard of for a Winter Olympics: Vancouver 2010, which also had to wrestle with the downturn, mustered a very creditable $688 million (£421 million/€489 million); Turin 2006 managed $348 million (£219 million/€255 million).

The moral of this tale: the world is changing.

London 2012, by dint of hard work and ingenuity, raised about as much from sponsorship as it is humanly possible for a west European capital with a mature, flat-lining economy to raise.

Go to a BRIC, the figures seem to be saying, and you will either raise more (bearing in mind, once again, that Sochi is hosting a Winter Olympics and that Beijing 2008 generated $1.22 billion (£768 million/€893 million) in domestic sponsorship three years ago), or you will raise a similar amount with less effort and better visibility for each individual sponsor.

In this context, it will be most intriguing to digest the various sponsorship strategies devised by Baku, Doha, Istanbul, Madrid, Rome and Tokyo, which collectively comprise a  diverse list of 2020 applicant-cities.

David Owen worked for 20 years for the Financial Times in the United States, Canada, France and the UK. He ended his FT career as sports editor after the 2006 World Cup and is now freelancing, including covering the 2008 Beijing Olympics and 2010 World Cup. Owen's Twitter feed can be accessed by clicking here