Brisbane 2032 and Beyond: How Olympic and Commonwealth Games Accreditation Works

Glasgow 2026 closed on 2 August, with Amdavad 2030 taking the baton as the next Commonwealth Games host. After that comes Brisbane 2032. For Australian organisations, the 2032 Olympic and Paralympic Games have stopped being a distant fixture on the calendar.

Construction of the 63,000 seat Brisbane Stadium at Victoria Park began in June 2026 as part of a $7.1 billion venue and infrastructure programme, delivered by the Games Independent Infrastructure and Coordination Authority. A draft legacy masterplan for the Victoria Park precinct, including a new National Aquatic Centre and upgraded Brisbane Showgrounds, went out for community consultation in August 2026.

The buildings get the attention. The accreditation system behind them rarely does, despite being the thing that decides who can enter which part of a venue, when, and under what conditions. This article covers how Games accreditation is structured, how zone based access control works, how mass issuance is staged across the years before an event, and what Australian organisations should be doing now.

What Games Accreditation Actually Is

An accreditation card is not a ticket. A ticket grants a spectator entry to a seat for a session. An accreditation credential grants a working participant conditional access to operational areas of a venue based on their role.

A single credential carries four separate pieces of information at once:

• Identity — photograph, name, and the organisation or national body the holder represents
• Function — the role category, such as athlete, team official, technical official, media, broadcast, medical, contractor or volunteer
• Zone permission — the specific operational areas the holder may enter
• Validity — the date range, and in some cases the specific venues, the credential is active for

Accreditation is issued centrally by the organising committee rather than by individual venues. That central control is what allows a credential issued months in advance to be recognised at every venue in the programme, and revoked everywhere at once if it needs to be.

How Zone Based Access Control Works

Every venue is divided into zones. Field of play, athlete preparation areas, broadcast compound, media workroom, medical and anti-doping facilities, back of house logistics, and general operational areas are each treated separately. Restricted areas within those zones are handled separately again.

The credential carries codes for the zones the holder is cleared to enter. Those codes are printed large, usually in a dedicated band down one side or across the base of the card, so a marshal at an access point can verify them at a glance. Function categories are typically colour coded for the same reason.

Two design pressures shape the whole system:

• Verification has to be near instant. At peak, an access point may process hundreds of people in a short window. Anything that requires a marshal to study the card creates a queue, and queues at access points create operational and safety problems.
• Permissions have to be readable at distance. Security staff need to identify someone in the wrong area before that person reaches a controlled door, not at the door.

Temporary upgrades are handled through supplementary devices rather than reissued cards. A day pass, an upgrade tab or a colour coded overlay attached to the credential grants access to a zone the base card does not cover, for a defined period. This keeps the base credential stable across the entire Games while still allowing thousands of daily exceptions.

Accreditation policy for Brisbane 2032 has not been published, and the detail will be set by the organising committee closer to the event. The structural model above, however, has been consistent across recent Olympic, Paralympic and Commonwealth Games.

The Mass Issuance Phases

Credentialing at Games scale is not a single production run. It is four distinct phases, each with a different operational profile, spread across several years.

Phase 1: Registration and vetting. Beginning well before the event, participating bodies submit personnel data, photographs and role requests. Security agencies conduct background checks. This phase is data management rather than card production, and it is where most of the elapsed time goes.

Phase 2: Centralised pre-production. Approved credentials are personalised in bulk ahead of arrival, typically at a secure central facility. Print quality and consistency matter most here, along with the security features applied during the print cycle.

Phase 3: Validation on arrival. Card holders present in person at an accreditation centre, where identity is verified against the pre-produced card and the credential is activated. A card that has not been validated does not work, which limits the value of one stolen in transit.

Phase 4: On event issuance and replacement. Distributed issuance points handle late additions, lost card replacement, contractor changes and upgrades throughout the event. Here the priority reverses. Throughput and turnaround matter more than anything else, because every person waiting is a person not doing their job.

Phases 2 and 4 have close to opposite requirements, which is why large events almost always run more than one printer configuration. We covered the hardware side of that split in Sporting Event Credentialing: Oversized Card Printers for Olympics, Commonwealth Games and Major Tournaments.

Why Card Format Is Decided First

Zone codes, function colours, a large photograph and a national body identifier do not fit legibly on a standard CR80 card. This is why oversized credentials have become the default format for events at this scale.

The format decision comes first because everything else follows from it. Printer selection, card stock, lanyard and holder specification, artwork templates and even the physical layout of accreditation centres are all downstream of card size. Changing format late is expensive.

The PPC OverSized E+ produces full colour, full bleed oversized credentials at up to 190 cards per hour, with HoloKote security watermarking applied as part of the standard print cycle. For higher throughput issuance points, inkjet systems designed for plastic cards scale better at large formats than dye sublimation does.

The Chip Layer

Printed zone codes handle general verification. Controlled areas need electronic enforcement as well, which means a contactless chip in the card.

MIFARE DESFire EV3 is the current standard for this work. It supports encrypted mutual authentication, multiple independent applications on one chip, and immediate revocation of a lost or compromised credential across the whole system. Legacy platforms such as MIFARE Classic do not meet the security expectations of a modern accreditation programme, and specifying them now creates a migration problem later. Not All MIFARE Cards Are Created Equal covers why chip specification and card sourcing matter more than they appear to.

Combining a printed oversized credential with an embedded chip gives organisers fast visual checks at general access points and enforced electronic control at restricted ones, from a single card.

What Australian Organisations Should Be Doing Now

Most organisations reading this will never issue an Olympic credential. The lead up to 2032 still affects a large number of them.

• Venue and stadium operators. Existing staff, contractor and match day credentialing systems will need to interoperate with Games accreditation during the event period, and carry the venue on its own for the years either side.
• Contractors on the venue build. The construction programme runs from 2026 through to 2032. Site induction cards, machine tickets and certification cards across a project of this length need a card platform that will still be supported at the end of it.
• Transport, hospitality, security and cleaning providers. Surge workforces need identification that can be issued quickly, verified visually, and switched off the day a contract ends.
• Universities, TAFEs and training organisations. Volunteer programmes at recent Games have run to tens of thousands of people, with a large share recruited and trained through the education sector.
• Anyone specifying a card platform in 2026. A chip platform chosen today will most likely still be in service in 2032. That is the practical reason to specify DESFire EV3 now rather than carrying a legacy platform forward.

The recurring lesson from previous Games is that credentialing problems are rarely printing problems. They are planning problems that only become visible at the print stage, usually too late to solve cheaply.

Where PPC Fits

PPC has supplied card issuance systems to Australian organisations since 1986, with more than 7,000 printers in the field and offices in Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne. Our head office is in Eagle Farm, roughly six kilometres from the Victoria Park site.

We work with event and sporting organisations including Tennis Australia on event and staff credentialing, alongside long term customers such as Brisbane Airport, Qantas, UNSW and TAFE Queensland. That work covers printer selection and configuration, oversized and standard card stock, MIFARE chip specification and encoding workflow, card design and production software, and integration with access control hardware from HID and Gallagher.

If your organisation expects to issue credentials in the lead up to 2032, whether for the venue programme, a surge workforce or your own operations, the useful conversation is the one that happens before the format is locked in. Talk to PPC ID Solutions about your credentialing requirements.

MIFARE and DESFire are registered trademarks of NXP Semiconductors N.V. HID is a trademark of HID Global Corporation. Gallagher is a trademark of Gallagher Group Limited. PPC ID Solutions is an independent supplier and is not affiliated with NXP Semiconductors, HID Global, or Gallagher Group, and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or an official supplier to the International Olympic Committee, Commonwealth Sport, or the Brisbane 2032 Organising Committee.