First understand the concept. Your ticket does not need to be punched, examined, handled by humans. Wave it past the scanner and you are in. This is now a well established procedure and most of us have used it or seen it in use.

There are, but of course, different standards, but the one which will be used at the Olympics supports the ISO 14443 type B contactless standard. As with most transit cards, data on the small chips embedded in the tickets for the games will be hard-coded. Chinese officials are ordering more than 12 million paper contactless tickets for the 2008 Summer Olympic Games, more than was earlier projected.

France-based contactless vendor ASK has announced its Chinese joint venture had won a contract to supply contactless inlays for 12.2 million low-cost tickets that will be issued to attendees of the games.

The contract calls for ASK TongFang to provide the chip-and-antenna inlays to China Banknote Printing, which will then supply the actual tickets.

The tickets also will carry anti-fraud printing features. They are not, however, totally fraud-proof. But safer than, say, bar codes or other methods.

Organizers of the World Cup football tournament in Germany in 2006 issued more than 3 million paper contactless tickets. There appear to have been no forgeries although, of course, it did nothing to improve the behavior of the English football fans.

ASK formed its joint venture with Tsinghua Tongfang, a mostly state-owned computer and IT company, in 2005.
Source: Card Technology

About 1.85 million tickets for the 2008 Olympic Games will go on sale as the second round of booking starts this week.

Rong Jun, head of BOCOG’s ticketing center, said, ‘The tickets will be sold on the ‘first come, first serve’ basis in this stage.’
Rong said that each person is allowed to buy a maximum of 50 tickets, while a limit of two tickets at most is applied for the high-demand events.

Excluding those reserved for the Olympic Family, sponsors and rights-holding broadcasters, more than seven million tickets are available for sale, with about 40% being reserved for domestic sale.

According to BOCOG, the 63,000 tickets to the opening and closing ceremonies at the 91,000-seat National Stadium, dubbed the ‘Bird’s Nest’, and over two million tickets for sports events were sold out during the first stage between April and August this year.

To make the Olympics affordable to average Chinese residents, about 58% of the tickets are priced at RMB100 (about $13.3) or below, and 14% will be reserved for Chinese students for RMB10 or less.

Income from ticket sales is expected to reach about $140 million and BOCOG is confident of reaching the target.
Source: China View

There is nothing like a list of statistics to help you get the Olympic Games into perspective. Here are some:

28 Olympic programs, 302 sub-categories.
302 gold medals.
10,500 athletes are expected to participate.
21,880 torchbearers will run 137,000 km over 130 days.
The National Stadium (now and for ever called the Bird’s Nest) covers an area of 258,000 sq. meters and has 91,000 seats.
The surface of the National Aquatics Center is covered by 1,437 pieces of transparent material.
The highest price for the opening ceremony tickets is RMB5,000, the lowest is RMB200.
Beijing expects 550,000 international visitors and 2.4 million domestic spectators.
Over 800 star-class hotels and 4,000 hostels will provide about 420,000 over-priced rooms.

If you have an established domicile in China you can try to get a ticket on the official Beijing Olympics website. Phase 1 has ended but in October 2007 there is a new chance.
Source: China Snippets

300,000 people across China have become the first group to get tickets for the 2008 Olympic Games. Organizers have released the outcome of allocation for the first round of booking.

The Beijing Olympic Organizing Committee (BOCOG) said that a total of 1,593,345 tickets would be allocated to over 300,000 people and that all the 26,000 tickets to the opening ceremony had been sold out, with only one winner for every 21 applications.

Basketball, diving, table tennis, football and gymnastics were the top five high-demanding sports events and 34.6% of the applicants would be allocated tickets for the sports events. For the closing ceremony, 15.1% of the 172,219 applicants were lucky enough to get a ticket.

The first round of ticket sales started in mid April and ended by June 30. During this period, the Beijing Olympic ticketing center received more than 720,000 applications, requesting for 5.18 million tickets. Due to higher demand for some tickets, 72% of the 2.2 million tickets available to the public during the first phase were sold.

Rong Jun, head of the Olympic ticketing center, said that for oversubscribed events, a random computerized selection process was used to ensure the fairness of allocation. He said, ‘The process was totally transparent and fair.’

The second stage of the tickets selling will start from October with the principal of ‘first come, first served’. People can book tickets through a hotline, the official ticketing website and Bank of China branches.

About seven million tickets are put on sale to the public for the 2008 Games, with over 70% reserved for domestic sales. Prices range from RMB30 ($3.97) to RMB5,000 ($660).
Source: People’s Daily Online

The first phase of ticket sales for the 2008 Olympic Games has come to a close with more than 700,000 people who booked 4.9 million tickets.

Rong Jun, director of the Beijing 2008 Ticketing Center said, ‘More orders are expected to come in the next few days as some are delivered by mail.’

According to Rong Jun, of the 700,000 orders, about 90% were over the Internet, with the rest through Bank of China branches or by mail.

Though bookings far exceeded the supply volume of 2.7 million tickets for the first phase from April 15 to June 30, it doesn’t mean all are sold out.

Rong Jun said, ‘Orders are relatively centralized. Some hot events such as the opening and closing ceremonies are over-subscribed, while a few other events are a little unpopular.’

Rong Jun said it was certain that the distribution of the opening and closing ceremonies’ tickets will be decided by lot. Other popular ticket choices were for football, basketball, volleyball, table tennis, badminton, diving and gymnastics.

Tickets will be assigned between July and August before the second leg of domestic sales kick start in October and run through December.

In a country with a population of 1.3 billion, many believe that only the luckiest will have chance of watching the Games, though three-quarters of the seven million very affordable tickets are reserved for domestic sales.

The Beijing Olympic Organizing Committee (BOCOG) has limited the number of tickets each individual can buy — one each for the opening and closing ceremonies, and two tickets for events in high demand. For other competitions, each buyer will be limited to three to five tickets based on demand.
Source: China View