LONDON 2012: Locog's ticket secrecy only fuels public cynicism ahead of the Games

LONDON 2012 organisers need to bite the bullet and come clean on the exact breakdown of their ticketing arrangements for this year's Olympics - otherwise it will continue to bug them to the Games and beyond, leaving an indelible stain on their otherwise impressive record.

PRIZED: A ticket to the Games is proving hard to find for some - not aided by the fact it's reported many showpiece events will not meet Locog's target of making 75 percent of seats available to the general public (Getty Images)

London Assembly members are fuming that Locog are giving no firm numbers on seat allocation, other than insisting 75 percent of all tickets will be available to the general public.

And the longer they stay silent - they insist they will reveal the exact numbers at the end of the complex ticketing process - the more cynical an already very cynical public becomes, if conversations with fans at this week's cycling test event are anything to go by.

At the Sydney 2000 Olympics it emerged that only 14 top category tickets for the diving final were available for standard purchase and reports today suggest that only 29,000 of the 80,000 Olympic Stadium seats for the showpiece 100m final have been made available to the general public. 

The Sunday Times claims that 21,000 of this number have already been sold and 8,000 more will go on sale in April.

If that right, that means if you were among the 1.8 million applications for the prized session in the first round of ticketing, your odds of success were just under 100-1 - about the same chances as bringing up four numbers on the National Lottery.

As long as Locog remain silent, it will only fuel those who claim they are only achieving their 75 percent target by using the big numbers of seats available for the football tournament, approximately 1.5 million tickets of these remain unsold.

LONDON 2012'S RESPONSE "We still have over three million Olympic and Paralympic tickets to sell and our priority is to get these into the hands of sports fans. We are firmly committed to providing 75 per cent of the total number of Olympic tickets to the British public, and if we can deliver more than this, we will.”

That's unless they have something to hide. 

Locog are a private company and are not subject to Freedom of Information requests, although political pressure can still be applied.

However, sports minister Hugh Robertson has been reticent to comment and it will be interesting to see how Boris Johnson reacts when the issue is raised - as it will be - at this week's Mayor's Question Time at City Hall.

Locog's next challenge will be to decide how they organise April's ticket sale, which you can guarantee they won't be launching on the 1st, to save the inevitable headlines.

Do they give priority to those who were unsuccessful in the first two rounds of ticketing, estimated to be around 15,000 people, or do they organise yet more ballots.

If so, can you imagine the interest in the 100m final and the odds of snaffling one of the 8,000 remaining tickets?

Surely the only fair thing to do is allow those who tried and failed in the opening two rounds a chance to have first dibs when seats go back on sale.

London 2012 Seb Coe promised as much last June when he said: "We aim to get as many of these tickets as possible into the hands of customers who have missed out to date."

One thing is for sure, given Ticketmaster's hapless handling of previous sales on a website that is about as cutting edge as the Uganda cycling team, it won't be a first-come, first-served free-for-all.

© Sportsbeat 2011

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