There seems to be a small panic in the air over what is, in Olympic terms, a fairly common experience.

About 75% of tickets offered in China’s second lottery for this year’s Olympic games remained unsold despite a flood of applications.

The Beijing organizing committee (BOCOG) said it received more than 4.5 million applications for some 1.8 million tickets but was only able to allocate 450,000 tickets.

There is a simple reason for this: some sports are immensely more attractive than others.

It has always been the same at every other Olympic Games. Choosing a sport at random getting to see pistol or rifle competitions has always been pretty easy. These are not a widely supported sports. Probably the same for horse dressage. But if you want to see the end of the marathon then lots of luck.

Ticketing officials had already warned last month that demand was extremely high but ‘too centralized on several hot events.’ Well, yes, that is the common experience at all Olympics.

More than seven million tickets are to be sold for the 2008 Games, about 40% of them in China, with an expected revenue of $140 million dollars.

And they will be.

When people find that cannot see their favorite sport they buy tickets to pretty much ANY sport just to say they saw part of the Olympics. For the record I paid to go and see the dressage at the Australia Olympics. And I do not like horses.

Selling tickets for such a huge, complex event has been a headache for past Olympics Games but Beijing got it a bit wrong initially when its computer collapsed. But it will probably all come good in the end as fans realize they can see part of the Olympics, if not their favorite sport.
Source: Reuters