The third phase of London 2012 ticket sales begins today, with those successful in the initial ballot given an opportunity to hoover up any leftovers. With just 8,000 available for freestyle wrestling, 40,000 for volleyball and, approximately 1.5 million for men’s and women’s football, this latest sales round appears to be a case of third time unlucky.
The London Organising Committee will claim, no doubt, that the limited number of available tickets is a mark of the success of the sales process so far. In truth, however, LOCOG failed miserably in its attempts to achieve the 2012 ticket balancing act, with vehement and increasing anger towards an unfit process which left millions both disappointed and disillusioned.
This frustration is sure to grow as more people piece together the snippets of information that LOCOG has released about the process so far – in particular about the overall number of available tickets.
It was revealed after the initial ballot that 1.9 million people bid for the 6.6 million available tickets, but that 1.2 million of those people missed out. This group was given the chance to bid in the second round for the remaining available 2.3 million tickets (three-quarters of which were for football) – which would imply that the lucky 700,000 between them carved up 3.3 million tickets.
It turns out, however, that 6.6 million tickets were not available after all. It is unclear when this number was altered, but it was revealed during the process that 1.3 million (20%) were being held back to be sold late in 2011 or in 2012. For the 100m final, 8,000 tickets were held back – ensuring that the ballot contained just 21,000 tickets. (Yes, that’s right, in a stadium with an 80,000 capacity, it currently seems that just 29,000 tickets are to be sold to the public).
The new 1.3 million will be available for anyone to purchase, regardless of whether they have previously applied for tickets (or indeed already have a 100m final ticket), and, as is becoming customary, details about the when and how of these sales has not been released.
In summary, so far 3.5 million tickets have been sold, many of the 2 million people who applied are annoyed as they have missed out on tickets for events they wanted, thousands of them have now bought tickets that were not their first choice, but another 1.3 million tickets – including for blue riband events – will go on sale next year.
Bearing in mind that there are 7.8 million people living in London, that the five London Premier League football teams between them sold 3.7 million tickets for their home games last season, and that Britain is a sports-mad nation, then the number sold so far is hardly a triumph. But worse, it has been a PR disaster.
LOCOG has some fences to mend before releasing the 1.3 million, not because they will be hard to shift, but because a city of people divorced from the Games will soon begin to fully comprehend and fiercely question the negative aspects of London 2012 – in particular the disruption to daily life (closed parks and over-zealous road restrictions) and the un-escapable council tax contribution. After after all the fuss, if there’s a single empty seat in the house, there will be hell to pay.
Behind the numbers, the approach to ticketing by LOCOG feels less like the people’s Games and more like Moscow 1980. Limited information about numbers of tickets available for events, not announcing the process in advance, moving the dates during which funds needed to be available in bank accounts, collecting people’s money without telling them what tickets were for, changing the overall numbers seemingly at will – at a time when our other public bodies are facing scrutiny like never before, the lack of transparency seems entirely out of place for an event funded with £9.3 billion of public funds.
Those involved in running our Olympics need to be held to account; they could start by dispensing correct information in a timely and unambiguous fashion, and answer the following four questions: How many tickets are actually still available for each event? What price bands are they in? When will they go on sale? How will the process work?
I’m increasingly sceptical about any LOCOG communication, but I know they are wrong about one thing: two tickets for £90 to watch freestyle wrestling on a Wednesday afternoon are most definitely not the greatest tickets on earth. I’ll be giving this round of sales a very wide berth.