OLYMPIC TICKETS

When it was announced that the Olympics would be coming to London in 2012 I really thought there might be a chance that I could get some tickets. So when the Website opened for people to register their interest I registered mine. When the time came to apply for tickets I looked at the prices and decided there was no way I could afford tickets for most of the events. For example, I would have liked to have seen the Diving but to do so would have meant buying several tickets for what amounted to the same event, making it quite pricey in even the cheapest of seats. However I did apply for several tickets, and, of course, got zilch!

Why, I wonder, did the organisers use a ballot to allocate tickets to the public? Surely it would have been much fairer and a lot easier to have sold them on a first come, first served basis. As things stand a number of people managed to get large allocations and they did so by applying for hundreds if not thousands of tickets. The reason that most normal people did not use this tactic is the chance that they might just have been lucky and been allocated the tickets for which they applied. Those with pots of money could take the risk which most ordinary people couldn’t, so once again a system has been devised which unfairly favours the wealthy to the detriment of the average/poor.

What makes the whole thing so annoying is that tickets have been available on the Internet from Germany and, I suspect, sites in other countries. Whilst we had to go into a ballot with little chance of success unless we ordered £1,000’s worth of tickets, the German site were selling on a first come, first served basis. If one had been aware of this it would have been possible to have purchased them but, of course, we weren’t told by the British Olympic Ticket Office if we had secured tickets or not, or what they were if we found out we had been charged on our credit cards, and by then it was too late.

So, for me and for thousands of others, we will be watching the Olympics on television and dream what it would have been like to have been there.