Heavy metal: Lord Coe and Dame Kelly Holmes with the London 2012 Olympic medals (Photo: EPA)
Amidst all of the hoopla and excitement of celebrating one year to go until the London 2012 Olympic Games there was one irksome point that kept raising its head. Olympic tickets.
London organisers were, quite rightly, very proud of their achievements so far, but Locog chairman Seb Coe was defensive when pesky interviewers kept asking about Olympic tickets.
And Coe kept repeating the mantra that has become so routine he doesn’t even have to think about it. But he should, because it is misleading.
Coe says there were two million people applied for 22 million tickets with just six million tickets available, a world record.
But there were only 5.3 million tickets available, not six million, or 6.6 million. And a lot of people all wanted the same events.
Any company chairman reporting to its shareholders would have to disclose real sales, not just the stampede of shoppers at a sale. They would also have to be pretty clear about how much stock was available in that sale too.
So what have Locog’s other figures looked like? The ones that really matter – the money? If we look at the actual sales so far, there have been about 4 million tickets sold to 1.2 million purchasers.
These figures are still impressive, still reflective of an organisation that will hit pre-sales budget targets of £400m, so why the obfuscation? Why don’t we hear these numbers being trumped about?
Given that Locog never releases exact figures (why not?) we can only go on their own published information.
Sometimes Coe rounds down – like people applying for 21 million tickets, or there were just over 1.8 million applicants , or rounds up. sometimes about there being 6.6 million tickets.
It is like the early figures about how many people were successful in the first round. Originally word was 200,000 people missed out – never released by Locog, but never corrected by them either. That figure escalated to 900,000, which became an official figure of 1.2 million.
The reality was only one in three people got tickets in the first round. Thousands more including Mayor of London Boris Johnson, were successful in the second round.
Another oft repeated ticket fact is that 23 or 24 of the 26 sports are sold out. Well, yes, if we are talking about the current batch of 5.3 million tickets. But there are another million plus tickets that will be released around this Christmas, including to all of the highly sought after events like athletics and swimming and cycling and gymnastics and even the opening ceremony.
So is sold out really sold out when there is another whack of tickets still sitting in the Canary Wharf offices?
This is where Coe gets his six million plus tickets numbers from. He is including future ticket inventory with the current batch. Which is fine if people understand that. But Locog, in official releases, have started spinning the message that there will be a ”further” one million tickets available.
Call me cynical, but people might think that there are another million or so on top of the six million that Coe keeps talking about.
The public has been angry at the ticket sales process because they have had unrealistic expectations. Messages from Olympic organisers like “planning your Games” or “only apply for the tickets you can afford” gave an impression there would be a significant choice for people.
People may have adopted different buying strategies if they truly understood how few tickets were for sale to particular events.
Before the ticket sales there were expectations more than half of the tickets would be for the UK public – yet only 21,000 seats were released for men’s 100m final.
Don’t get me wrong, the organisers, particularly the Olympic Delivery Authority, have done a remarkable job so far. It is just a shame that little facts and figures keep getting in the way.
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