It was a deeply uncomfortable moment for all concerned. As South Africa's hockey team stood to attention ahead of their London Cup match against Britain last month, blaring over the loudspeakers came not the country's national anthem, Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika, but the apartheid-era version, Die Stem.
Niccy Halifax, who is organising the victory ceremonies at the London Olympics, insists the prospect of such horrors, and the grovelling apologies which follow, does not keep her awake at night. "It just isn't going to happen. It's not. It's not," she says, with conviction.
Halifax's confidence comes from the Olympic Games organisers' ultra-safe, hopefully foolproof approach to avoiding embarrassment at medal ceremonies. As well as protocol officers, those on the watch for mistaken anthems or upside-down flags will include the hugely experienced audio and video production staff overseeing the ceremonies and teams of highly drilled flagbearers from the army, navy and RAF.
Even the Games Makers volunteers at the ceremonies have been issued with booklets showing more than 200 national flags and instructions to memorise them – work that will doubtless make them invaluable at pub quizzes for years to come.
The work began by sitting down for a very long time to analyse how mistakes happened in the past, Halifax says. "Like with everything, this can happen as soon as you get humans involved."
To avoid this, London 2012's ceremonies will involve as many humans as possible cross-checking everything, all using the most simple of systems. Anthems are selected using a "drag and drop" computer system, used for nothing else. The anthem files show both the three-letter country code and the national flag, which is compared with the physical flag being prepared at the same time. These flags also have the country code and name written on them in small type, as well as an arrow pointing to the top.
Several different sets of people check everything is correct before the flag and medal bearers walk out, and the process is overseen by producers who have undergone extensive training, including regular flag-naming contests. Halifax says: "All the people involved understand this process and the importance of the flag and the anthem. They've done either backstage management in very big theatres or TV studios, or they're sound engineers or producers from sports presentation. They're really professional."
The anthems are stored on hard drives at every venue, as well as a central database which can be used if the first crashes. If all else fails, each venue has a stack of CDs, one for each anthem. "There are backups to the backups to the backups," Halifax says.
Similar rigour has been applied to the national flags, under the watchful eye of Warrant Officer Paul Barker, state ceremonial training officer for the Royal Navy and fresh from organising the ceremonial guards at the Queen's diamond jubilee.
He has spent weeks drilling 25 seven-strong teams of military personnel – eight each from the navy and RAF, and nine from the army – firstly at a military base and then, as of this week, at the venues themselves.
Barker is confident that come the Games the correct flags will be raised on the correct poles every time. "Mistakes do happen during training and that's why we do the training," he says. "But when the guys get to the various venues they will have a protocol officer for each team to double-check things. It's actually been a lot simpler than we were originally predicting.
"We just do the ceremonial role, which is what we do best – a bit of pomp and ceremony."
But even this has to be done just right. All flag-bearers learn how to fold their flags to make sure they don't touch the ground – a big no-no – when carried out. Perhaps unexpectedly, there is no set folding method, Barker explains: "It's folded as neatly as possible so that when it's laid across the arm it doesn't touch the ground as you march off. I've got people that are 6ft-plus and I've got people that are under 5ft, so how you do it is an individual challenge. But as long as it looks smart and correct they're allowed to do their own thing."
In each team, two people take each flag, one carrying it out and the other attaching it to the pole using quick-to-use Inglefield clips, named after the 19th-century naval officer who invented them.
After the seventh member, the captain, hears the shouts of "Gold ready!", "Silver ready!" and "Bronze ready!" he awaits the word that the winning anthem is due before the hoisting begins.
The winning flag gets two tugs on the halyard first – it has the highest pole and must never be below either of the others – and the whole process must be completed within 35 seconds, the length of the shortest national anthems, for example that of Uganda, comprising a mere eight bars of music.
"We've been told that it doesn't matter if the longer anthems are still playing when the flags reach the top, just as long as we're not still raising them when the music stops," Barker says.
Getting this timing right takes endless practice: "It's literally standing there with a stopwatch and you time them. You repeat it and repeat it until they get into that natural rhythm."
This week's rehearsals at the venues should iron out any remaining hitches, he predicts: "Nerves are always an issue. At the moment they've done the flag raising in front of their mates. At the rehearsals they'll do it in front of strangers. On the day it could be in front of 80,000-plus. Sometimes the nerves work for us, makes you concentrate. I don't foresee any major problems at this stage."
Possibly the worst anthem mistake ever
Even if disaster strikes at a 2012 victory ceremony, the blunder is unlikely to match that in March this year, when officials in Kuwait treated Kazakhstan's shooting team to not their own anthem but a profane spoof from the film Borat.
As shooter Maria Dmitrienko received her gold medal, out from the PA system came a song beginning: "Kazakhstan greatest country in the world / All other countries are run by little girls / Kazakhstan number one exporter of potassium / Other countries have inferior potassium."
Another section ran: "Kazakhstan's prostitutes cleanest in the region / Except of course Turkmenistan's."
A video of the ceremony shows Dmitrienko on the podium, her hand on her heart, looking perplexed as the song begins to play. She appears to see the funny side and is smiling by the end.
Kazakh officials nonetheless demanded an apology. Kuwaiti officials – who had downloaded the Borat version from the internet – restaged the ceremony with the correct anthem.