First we ran the story 75% of tickets unsold in 2nd phase despite high bookings which is directly below this.

Now we show the other side of the story which are that tickets to the 2008 Games are proving to be among the most coveted in sporting history.

Scalpers already are demanding as much as $40,000 a seat for the August 8 opening ceremony, and tickets for popular sports such as basketball, gymnastics and ping pong (a particular Chinese favorite) are going for ten times their face value. The person in our illustration applying for tickets at the Bank of China simply has no chance. None whatsoever.

The demand for the roughly seven million tickets that the Beijing Olympic Committee is putting on sale for the general public comes from inside and out.

One side are Americans and Europeans who have long dreamed of visiting China and think the Olympics will be the right occasion. On the other, middle-class Chinese families who want to watch with pride as their nation celebrates what is widely touted as a coming-out party.

On the domestic market, ticket seekers have been frustrated by long lines and crashing computer systems.

Two rounds of lotteries to buy tickets have yielded far more losers than winners. The disappointed are pleading their case for tickets on Ganji.com, which is sort of the Craig’s List of China. Even previous contestants cannot get tickets. Ji Ting, a 31-year-old former television executive posted an advertisement for the Olympic Star Security Fund, a charity she set up last year to buy tickets for former Olympians. She said, ‘These retired athletes don’t have much money. They’re not good with computers. They won’t stand a chance on their own.’

The charity has so far been unable to purchase a single ticket through the regular distribution network, so is asking the Beijing organizers to donate a few dozen tickets — at least enough to give to one gold medalist from each of China’s 23 provinces.

Officials of the Beijing Organizing Committee for the Games of the XXIX Olympiad say the competition for tickets is a badge of success.

Jeffrey Ruffolo, a spokesman for the committee said, ‘The interest level is staggering. It’s way beyond what we saw in the last three Olympics.’

So what is the problem?

First, the organizers set aside nearly three-quarters of the tickets for the domestic market. That means fewer to be distributed abroad.

Second, the problems exist only in hot events.

One Beijing scalper offering tickets to men’s basketball and ping pong, along with the 110-meter hurdles in which Chinese heartthrob Liu Xiang is a contender, said he expected to get at least $2,000 each for tickets with a face value of $110 to $150. His advertisement on Ganji.com reads, ‘If you’re not financially strong, don’t bother me.’
Source: LA Times

The Beijing Olympics Organizing Committee (BOCOG) reports that only 450,000 tickets for this summer’s Olympic Games have been successfully allocated, accounting for about a quarter of the tickets available for sale in the second phase.

More than 700,000 orders for 4.2 million tickets were received by BOCOG, but only 123,000 bookings were confirmed after a computerized random draw.

Though BOCOG didn’t give a reason why about 75% of the tickets remain unsold it is fairly obvious — and this is confirmed from the experience of every previous Olymic Games — that some popular events were extremely over-subscribed while the rest of the events were in lesser demand. For example, the number of people who want to go and watch the equestrian dressage contests is finite.

Rong Jun, deputy head of BOCOG’s ticketing center, said earlier that the demand was ‘extremely high but too centralized on several hot events’.

This should not have come as a surprise. It has always been thus.

A total of 1.8 million tickets to the sports events of the Aug. 8—24 Games were put on sale in December. More than 1.5 million tickets were allocated in the first stage of ticket sales last year.

Despite the computer problems which badly affected some initial sales the end result will be the same at these Olympics as every other Olympics. Some events will be easy to get to even close to the day. Others, for more popular events, will be sold be ticket scalpers on the black market.

In Australia, there are concerns about the shortage of tickets for the Olympics. The Australian Olympic Committee (AOC) says it is in talks with organisers of the Beijing Games to secure more tickets for the families of competing athletes.

China has allocated 75%t of all tickets to itself, leaving the rest of the world to share the remaining quarter.

AOC spokesman Mike Tancred says the committee has made it a priority to allocate two tickets to each Australian athlete’s family for every event or session they are competing in.

He said, ‘I can’t say that no families will miss out, but we’ve absolutely made athletes’ families our priority because we understand how important it is to have that support in the stands for our athletes. We’re looking good at this stage. We just need those extra tickets in the preliminaries when the draw for the team sports is completed.’

Mike Tancred says the huge worldwide demand for tickets is making them difficult to obtain.
Source: East Day and ABC

Liao Peigui was convicted of operating a phony official Olympics website and taking money under false pretenses was sentenced to six months in prison in Beijing.

The Haidian District People’s Court of Beijing Municipality passed the jail sentence and a fine of RMB2,000 ($271) for defrauding two netizens into entering fake prize draws on a website he ‘cloned’ from the official BOCOG site.

His method was to get entrants to transfer and ‘award acceptance fee’ of RMB1,500 ($203) to an account he opened in March. For this they would get prizes which included RMB28,000($3,798) and two tickets for the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games.

Liao Peigui had worked as a computer engineer in south China’s Hainan Province.

China launched a six-month campaign last April targeting online pornography, fraud and theft.
Source: Windows of China

With the Beijing Olympic Games 239 days away, BOCOG (Beijing Organizing Committee for the Games of the XXIX Olympiad) celebrates its sixth birthday.

Liu Jingmin, BOCOG executive vice-president, said, ‘In the beginning, BOCOG had less than 100 staff members, but with the growing workload, we had to move twice, first from Xinqiao Hotel to a more spacious place — Qinglan Plaza in September 2002.’

On July 13, 2002, the first anniversary of Beijing’s bid victory,BOCOG officially published the Beijing Olympic Action Plan, which outlined the promises made in the bid document.

The plan covered such areas as general strategy, the construction of competition venues and related facilities, an ecological environment and city infrastructure, the social environment, and logistics.

In the first three years, BOCOG drew up and implemented a series of plans, unveiled the Olympic emblem of a ‘Chinese Seal, Dancing Beijing,’ dislosed the theme slogan of ‘One World One Dream,’ and revealed the five Fuwa mascots.

From 2003 to 2005, extensive work was done to draw up the competition schedule of the Beijing Olympics. The opening and closing ceremonies, ticket sales, the torch relay and other matters were also put on BOCOG’s agenda.

During this period, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) increased guidance regarding Olympic preparations.

In January of 2006, BOCOG moved again to a new but this time permanent place — the Olympic Tower, designated as the command center of the Olympics in 2008. The body of BOCOG expanded to over 20 departments.

2006 saw attention focused on the core of the Olympics, namely the sport competitions.

BOCOG oversaw the progress of the Olympic venues, the finalization of the sports schedule, ticket sales, recruitment of volunteers, and the staging of Good Luck Beijing sport events to test the venues’ functions and the organizers’ capabilities.
Source: Beijing 2008

There will be a lot of people at the Olympic Games — seven million of them from beginning to end.

Inevitably there are black market tickets for the Games and they are already being sold illegally (perhaps that is too strong a word for there is no law against it) on the internet.

The great mistake was allowing individuals to buy 50 tickets at a time and they are cashing in by selling them for more than 10 times their face value.

Beijing’s Olympic Committee (BOCOG) allows tickets to be transferred between users, but not for profit. Which is whistling in the wind unless there is law to enforce it.

More than 1.5 million tickets were allocated in the first round of ticket sales, which was only open to people living in mainland China.

Tickets for the opening ceremony on 8 August are on sale on the Internet for as much as 39,000 yuan ($5,270). Their face value is just RMB3,000.

Individuals who have been allocated tickets will not be given them until next summer, but this has not stopped people selling them beforehand.

Some buyers and sellers are signing contracts that promise tickets will be handed over immediately after they are issued.

These sales are being carried out despite a ban on speculation. There was a similar ban in Athens in 2004 and Sydney in 2000.

The number any individual can buy in the second round is being reduced to just eight tickets. Rong Jun, director of BOCOG Ticketing Center, and shown here, said they reduced the number of tickets each person can buy to give more people the chance to watch an Olympic event.
Source: BBC