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Wed, 22 Jun 2011

Olympic ticketing fiasco shows the Olympics aren't wanted

The lottery by which Olympic tickets were allocated is universally known to have been a poorly-organised disaster. In particular, you should consider that money to pay for tickets was taken from peoples' credit cards as early as the 10th of May but it's only today that LOCOG could tell people what tickets they'd actually got. That's a bit odd, cos I would have thought that they'd have known that, and therefore been in a position to tell people, back on the 10th of May.

But there's something more interesting hidden in the numbers describing the ticketing fiasco. 700,000 applicants got tickets, and 1.2 million didn't. This means that less than 2 million people in the entire country wanted to go and see any of the events, and 58 million didn't. Just 1 in 30 people are interested. For those one in thirty, the government has bent over backwards, introducing oppressive laws restricting trade and free speech, fucking up public transport and, of course, pissing billions of pounds of Londoners' money up the wall. All of this, for something that just one in thirty people give a shit about. For god's sake, no-one tell the government how many people care about football!

Thankyou very fucking much Seb Coe you midget Tory CUNT.

Posted at 16:13 by David Cantrell
keywords: london | olympics | rant
Permalink | 4 Comments

But didn't people on average try to get 4 or 5 tickets each? So it wouldn't just be 2 million people who wanted to go, but 2 million who wanted to go with their friends and family, or perhaps sell the tickets on. There is also another couple of chances for buying tickets as well.

Posted by Sam on Wed, 22 Jun 2011 at 18:20:00


In addition to Sam's remark, I would also consider that interest is not the same as buying tickets. I don't know the pricing ,as I'm not particularly interested myself, but they're probably not very cheap - probably even prohibitively so for a large part of the population.

Regardless of ability to pay, interest is also not binary - you can perfectly be interested enough to watch some events on the telly but not so much to be willing to pay for tickets.

That being said, while I appreciate the potential economic boost off tourism and international broadcasting, I wouldn't be particularly happy about an event I don't care about clogging up my city, either.

Posted by [anonymous] on Thu, 23 Jun 2011 at 09:23:33


If all you're going to do is watch it on the telly, you obviously don't care where it is held. There's a park just outside the IOC's front door in Lausanne. Perhaps they should hold their silly little sports day there.

Posted by David Cantrell on Thu, 23 Jun 2011 at 14:33:15


I wonder how many people will actually see the live event they WANT to in this lottery.

Posted by [anonymous] on Tue, 5 Jul 2011 at 22:07:17


Sorry, this post is too old for you to comment on it.

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