Yesterday morning, at 6am precisely, remaining tickets for the London Olympics went on sale. Did you not notice? LOCOG certainly kept a lot quieter this time - there's been minimalpublicity, not even an email fired off to eligible punters inviting them to take part. This third round of sales is for people who applied first time round and were lucky enough to get something. They get to pick over the scraps left behind after a fortnight of second chance sales, and scraps I'm afraid is all that's left. Only three sports remain, namely Volleyball, Wrestling and Football.
Volleyball: 40000 tickets available, higher priced seats available for 11 out of the 42 sessions, preliminary rounds only, almost all tickets costing £55 or more. Sold out 6pm Friday Wrestling: 8000 tickets available, women's freestyle wrestling only, higher priced seats available at four sessions (including medal ceremonies), mostly £65 Two sessions left Football: 1.5 million tickets available, at 36 out of 42 matches, seats at all price levels remain, only games at Wembley and Coventry appear to be selling well.
Sales of Volleyball went well yesterday and they've since sold out. A handful of women's Wrestling tickets remain, at the highest prices, but should sell out soon. So if you're reading this today, sorry, it's Football or nothing. And for most people that's going to be nothing, because it's hard to get excited about a sport most people don't consider terribly Olympic. Expect there to be more than a million Football tickets still up for grabs when this fortnight-long purchasing session closes.
Which leaves one more opportunity to snap up Olympic tickets, this time for anyone whether they applied first time round or not. Another million tickets, across all sports, will be put on sale to the public for the first time in December. Allegedly this is because seating plans aren't yet finalised, but I'm not sure how convincing an excuse this is. Sure, feedback from test events being held this summer might mean some extra capacity can be squeezed in, but surely nobody builds an Olympic Stadium without knowing precisely how many seats it holds. When thousands of Athletics tickets are suddenly made available this winter, I may not be alone in wondering why the hell they were held back from the original ballot in the first place. But let's wait and see before getting cross about something that hasn't even been decided yet. In the meantime, does anybody want to buy a football ticket? Anyone?
Olympic update
