Over four million Games tickets yet to be put up for sale

[divingbrit]

More than four million Olympic tickets have yet to put up for sale despite many sport lovers panic buying because they thought they had already sold out.

Locog, the Games’ organisers, have admitted they have tickets for most events still to sell and are working out last minute seating plans at venues.

"We simply do not have a full picture to present at the moment," they have admitted.

The news will anger many members of the public who bought tickets for lesser events in the second round of sales believing that all of the tickets to the most popular sports had been sold out in the first round.

Organisers now say they will release as many as four million additional tickets in April, taking their total ticket sales for the Olympics and the Paralympics to 11 million.

The new sales comprise more than one million tickets for the Olympics across most sports and including the opening and closing ceremonies.

There are still 1.5 million tickets for the football matches to shift and a further 1.5 million Paralympic tickets to sell.

Millions of people were left disappointed when Olympic tickets went on sale last April after tickets sales were many times oversubscribed.

A second sale for unwanted tickets also suffered technical problems when it was oversubscribed.

Because of the two sales, many people desperate to experience the Games bought tickets for less popular event believing all the seats for major sales had gone.

Their anger could be further fuelled if Locog goes ahead with charging for spectators to line the cycling road race.

Locog had previously billed the road cycling events as being free and had consoled people who had missed out on tickets in the public ballot that they would be able to line the race route of the cycling events instead.

Locog recently obtained council planning permission to extend the spectator numbers at the highest and most gruelling part of the cycling races at Box Hill from 3,000 to 15,000.

Telegraph Sport has been told Locog is currently working out the pricing for Box Hill because it is a prime vantage point and the cyclists will go through the area for up to nine laps.

Such a move will draw criticism from the public, who had been assured the race route will be free, except for the grandstand areas at the race finish in The Mall.

A Locog spokesman said: "We have never said it would be free, we have always been ticketing that part of the route to limit the numbers of people in that area and we are looking whether we will charge or not."

Locog has sold nearly seven million tickets to date, raising £527 million.

Just before Christmas the Locog chief executive Paul Deighton told Parliament he was "highly confident" of raising another £130m from further ticket sales.

However it appears from correspondence between Locog and the London Assembly, which earlier this week was damming of Locog’s secrecy around the ticket process and its private status, that Locog does not want to jeopardise future ticket sales by releasing ticketing information.

It is feared that the numbers of public tickets available at small but popular venues like the velodrome and the aquatics centre is incredibly low as most seats are taken by sponsors, media and VIPs.

Locog revealed that 2.1 million applications were made for the opening ceremony tickets in the public ballot, but it is believed less than 30,000 seats were made available to the public.

More than 1.8 million applications were received for just 22,000 tickets available to the public for the men's 100m final.

It is unclear how many tickets to those highly sought after events will be available in the April ticket release.

London Assembly’s economic development committee chair Baroness Doocey said last night: "I don’t think people have been fully aware that there may be more tickets available and even now I don’t think they are aware.

"The people who will be offered these tickets first will be those that missed out, they will have first refusal."

She also said any extra charges for the road cycling event would be "dreadful and most regrettable".

Locog ticketing executive Craig Beaumont has rejected claims that Locog was hiding behind its private company status.

‘’We do not hide behind our private company status, we have always said we will publish information on ticketing when we have a complete and accurate set of data and information,’’ he wrote to members of the London Assembly.

‘’With ticket sales on going, continuing seat configuration being worked through and seating still being finalised we simply do not have a full picture to present at the moment. ‘’

Beaumont said Locog was committed to providing a full breakdown of ticket sales but noted ‘’we believe the best time to do this is once we have completed the final sales process.

"This is a process still very much in motion and we still have nearly four million Olympic and Paralympic tickets to sell and our priority is to get those into the hands of sports fans.’’

Telegraph.co.uk