Saturday 25 June 2011

Cinders Won't Be Going to the Ball

The promise of more tickets to the Olympics gave the glimmer of hope that perhaps still there was a chance to be there. So before work yesteday logged onto the site to find something. Ridiculously, they hadn't removed all the sold out events, so you had to trawl through all the pages of no availability to find where the gaps were. No athletics. No swimming. No gymastics. No cycling. No table tennis. No basketball. No fencing. No anything that I really wanted to watch. Thought about things that I wouldn't mind to go and see just to be in the stadiums. Boxing (don't even really agree with this as a sport), but you would have to pay £75, or £95 per ticket and I didn't really want to go alone, so would have to buy 2. And it was at the Excel Centre. Not really in the Olympic park, not a new building, not a sport I really want to watch, why would I want to spend that kind of dough? Weight lifting? Not really. Wrestling? No. Did manage to get a set of tickets at Wembley for my sis and her family to watch football, but since she didn't want to pay top dollar either it had to be women's football (apologies for being disparaging about women's football).

And they said that in this round you were actually buying tickets not being in a lottery - it was first come first served. Suprised then, that at the end of the payment it said we will let you know in a weeks time if your application has been successful.

It really has been a mega shambles and makes me want to boycott the whole event. The news yesterday said only 7% of London families had any tickets. No suprise then that I don't know a single person who has been successful in securing tickets. I only know of people through other people who have been lucky. Also that for some of the most popular events only 55% of the tickets were even available. They should have given less to corporate sponsorship and sold them to the public since the public is clearly keen to attend.

So now, at the end of the ticket thing, Londoners will have to cope with the huge influx of tourists, transport crush, hoopla and in your face advertising and not be involved at all. Perhaps we should  leave the country during that time instead and take our money to somewhere its wanted - you can watch the olympics on tv from almost anywhere afterall.

5 comments:

la peregrina said...

What a shame that the people who are bearing the cost of having the Games in their own country are being shut out. That only 7% of London families have managed to get tickets is an outrage. What is the percentage for the whole country?

Peter said...

A couple of fun-to-watch sports you could try for are water polo and tae kwon do.

Harriet said...

They are now saying that only women's football is left. Not interested.

I don't know the percentage of tickets on Britain as a whole. But I do know there a lot of disgruntled people.

Blue Witch said...

"<span><span><span><span>They should have given less to corporate sponsorship and sold them to the public since the public is clearly keen to attend.</span></span></span></span>"

Tere is the small fact of economics that people seem to be overlooking.  Witout the corporate sponsors, it would have cost the taxpayer a whole lot more.

I read somewhere that a third of the corporate tickets are going to be given to the public via brand competitions - someone had worked out that the odds of winning one was better than getting tickets in te original ticket debacle.

Harriet said...

it might be worth a shot - if I can stop cutting my nose off to spite my face in time to join the competitions!