Ticket sales process for London 2012 'cruel' says Boris Johnson

[richard]

Boris Johnson, the Mayor of London, has labelled the sale of London 2012 Olympic tickets as "the cruel engine of disappointment" and called for greater transparency of the controversial process.

Johnson, a member of the Olympic Board, told the London Assembly he fully supported their damning report, Sold Out?, published last week. The report called for the release of greater details about how many tickets in each event have been made available for sale to the public.

The Mayor said he would be pressuring the Board to release ticket details.

"I fully share the desire of the Assembly for transparency and yes, we will be raising this at the Olympic board, the whole country wants to see transparency," Johnson said.

The London Assembly has raised concerns that the number of public tickets available for highly sought after events, such as track cycling, swimming, the ceremonies and athletics finals, is far fewer than the 75 per cent of all tickets organisers Locog say were made available to the public in general.

Locog have already revealed that just 29,000 seats of the 80,000-seat Olympic stadium have been made available for sale to the UK public, while public tickets in some categories for the Velodrome are believed to be in the hundreds, rather than the thousands.

The fear is that many more tickets to less popular Olympic events such as football are available to the public in order to achieve the goal of 75 per cent.

Previous Games have seen similar controversies. In Sydney, in 2000, organisers revealed they had just 14 tickets for sale in one price category to a diving final when they released their detailed ticketing information.

London Assembly chair of the economic, culture and sport committee, Dee Doocey, said she was encouraged the Mayor would pressure the Olympic board to release the ticket information immediately rather than after all the tickets had been sold.

"I am delighted that the Mayor supports the London Assembly's call for transparency from Locog," she said.

"In particular I welcome the fact that he has agreed to try to persuade Locog at the next Olympic Board meeting to immediately release the information.

"We need to know now how many tickets have been sold for each event, and at what price. If this information is not provided until all the tickets are sold it will be too late to do anything about it.

"Locog’s excuses for not publishing information are indefensible from an organisation that only exists because of a huge investment of public money."


Source
By Jacquelin Magnay
www.telegraph.co.uk