"When you're tired of London, you're tired of life..."

A strange thing happened to me last week. I’m still coming to terms with it. There I am, breastfeeding a two week old baby and I decide to log on to the London 2012 ticket site. Just to see. Because LOCOG suddenly announced they were releasing more athletics, boxing, swimming, table tennis, volleyball and football tickets. Just like that. JUST LIKE THAT.

Apparently they were ‘contingency’ Olympics tickets that became available as organisers worked out how many seats were needed for the media and spectators. That and the fact Thomas Cook haven’t been able to shift around 75,000 tickets they were allocated. I don’t know if this is a sign of excellent organisational skills as the ‘experts’ would have you believe or a right royal stuff up.

So there I am, telling my other half that only the really expensive seats would be left. And I click on the £20 athletics tickets. And before I know it, I have passed the point of no return. The screen refreshed once, twice and three times. The message was good. The message told me the tickets were mine. MINE! I had major surgery just two weeks ago but I ran around the bedroom squealing with delight – nay, ecstasy! No wonder I am in pain again today.

I have spent hours and hours on the Tickmaster site before now. My hopes, like many others, have been raised, only to be dashed half an hour later during each of the previous rounds. Now I hear there are several still available? I’m confused and battered by the process. So like a lamb to the slaughter, I went back for another go. What’s so astonishing is that I nearly didn’t. Then I read a tweet from Daley Thompson… DALEY THOMPSON! He can’t get London 2012 tickets. I feel so bad that I have them and he does not. He must be best mates with Lord Coe, but even he hasn’t been lucky in the Ticketmaster lottery.

It’s such a shame, because whether the experts are right or not (see article here), news items entitled ‘Ticket fatigue’ have started appearing in the press. This Olympics did not need any help in presenting itself in a negative light to the general public, so I can’t help but feel this is incompetence on a grand scale. But of course, I’ll be the first to admit, I’m no expert.

Thanks to Samuel Johnson.

Tickets, PLEASE!

So every day at 11am last week, I’ve imagined hundreds of people asking their bosses if they can ‘nip out’ for an early lunch/meeting/phone call while they spend the next hour desperately trying to navigate the ever confusing Ticketmaster website to purchase last chance Olympics tickets. I sincerely hope that if this is you, you got what you wanted.

I had the added complication of having my ‘due date’ thrown in to the mix. Would I be up to my eyeballs on gas and air shouting, ‘But I haven’t logged on yet to get my rowing tickets!’ or would I have to just take what I could get on day one? I decided with the latter as the disappointment would likely have matched the pain of delivery. (I know, I’m crazy).

So I still haven’t given birth to my Olympic baby (due to be born at Stoke Mandeville – the name of one of the funny looking Olympic mascots in case you didn’t know). But I did press the panic button early and bought Beach Volleyball Tickets on day two of the re-sale. I read a tweet that described the ticket sale as a mass free-for-all. You literally didn’t know if you would get anything in your basket after frantically trying to work out what was still available. (Apparently, everything was that was showing on the site – except, boo! It wasn’t…)

Obviously I’m chuffed I can go – admittedly, it was something I always took for granted when the London Olympics were announced. Am also delighted I can take my Olympic baby in arms – thanks for the u-turn there Lord Coe (see earlier post). Now I can put my feet up and think of Team GB in relative peace..!

The last of the tickets will be on sale this week – Paralympic sales Monday 21st and the rest of the Olympics Wednesday 23rd, first come, first served.

The great ticket scramble continues...

The London 2012 ticket saga continues this weekend. As someone who failed to get tickets in both rounds, but whose application didn’t go through in the second round, I have also missed out on the ‘golden’ window that began on Friday and ends at 6pm today (Saturday 12th May). During this period, further athletics and ceremonies tickets (around 928,000 seats as reported in Evening Standard, although news reports differ) were made available to a lucky 20,000 people. I should have been one of them. I have had endless problems with the Ticketmaster website. I feel so bitterly disappointed, but I have to be pleased for those who did achieve success yesterday…sort of!

I now have a chance to take a pick of what’s left of the tickets over the next 5 days. I can only apply for one event and up to four tickets. Not all events are for sale every day, so again, a game of tactics. Do you apply for a sport you’re not as keen on that may have more availability, or do you hold off until the last day if you like rowing the best? It’s a minefield of disappointment waiting to happen, as there is only a one in four chance for people like me to buy tickets.

I’m remaining optimistic, but I can’t help feeling that the tickets should have been available in the beginning. And with more and more being advertised in marketing promotions (yes, I admit, I am a hypocrite and am desperately entering these competitions!), I feel even harder done by. Ok, will stop moaning now.

I just have to feel blessed I was able to have my chance on the other side of the world. So far, London 2012 cannot match up to Sydney 2000 in this respect, but then, the internet is king now and with these being hailed as the ‘social media’ games, how can we expect life to go back to being as simple as turning up at a kiosk and buying tickets in person?

It's a Doozy

Baroness Doocey has an amazing name. I don’t mean reputation – I don’t know enough about that I’m afraid, but I will be researching her a little bit more, if only to find out how I can get such a cool title. All I know is that she is lobbying LOCOG to find out exactly how many Olympics tickets have been sold and at what price.

The sale of Olympics tickets is up there with the other great state secrets of our time – we’ll probably find out in years to come that a time capsule has been buried at great expense to the public, with all the answers she is looking for. Not to be opened until 3012. Or we might just find out later this week…

I was less sure of the recent Dispatches programme on Channel 4 this week, looking at whether dodgy dealings were afoot handling Olympics hospitality contracts. I felt the programme didn’t come to any real conclusions (Baroness D was on this as well), and simply left a negative feeling towards the Olympics that no one could quite put their finger on. ‘We think it’s all dodgy, so it probably is…’. But maybe I just wasn’t paying careful enough attention. The newspapers didn’t run with anything, so I assume everyone agreed with this prognosis. My other half says, ‘Well, she is a Lib Dem, so she’s going to be negative about the Olympics, isn’t she?’

My point? Rumour, scaremongering and negativity are rife just 200 days before the Olympics begin. It’s a hard tide to swim against.