Olympic Hopeful

The newspapers are picking it apart daily with analysis and opinion polls, while Lord Coe, Chair of the London Olympics Organizing Committee, (Sebastian to those of us who remember him as an eighties Olympic champion), has been forced to defend the ticket allocation process for the London 2012 Olympics. Fairness and logic have been called into question and, to be fair, it has been a funny old way of doing business. I’m no mathematician but with twenty million tickets up for grabs, and 1.9 million applicants, you’d think there would have been plenty for all. And if you’d read an initial estimate of a 250,000 unlucky applicants, that paltry figure has been revised as closer to 1 million.

I signed up on the UK 2012 Olympic ticketing website in March 2010, determined my husband and I should celebrate our joint fortieth birthdays on home turf at the London Olympics. The only snag, as I saw it, was getting my hands on tickets. After registration, came the first pep-talk email: Usain Bolt wants to be there - and we want you to be there too! By registering your interest in London 2012 ticketing you have taken the first step on your ticketing journey to 2012.You are now in the best position to find out when tickets will go on sale and how you will be able to apply for them.

Over the course of a year, enthusiastic outbursts would appear in my inbox, usually accompanied by one or more exclamation points. In May: Ten million tickets for the Olympic and Paralympic Games will go on sale in 2011, of which 75 per cent will be available directly to the public via a fair ballot process! In June: All venues are now in place for the London 2012 Games, as the final Football venue has been confirmed! In November: Ticket applications for the London 2012 Olympic Games will open in March 2011! In December, real news without excitable grammar: The application window will be open for a set period of time, after which all applications will be considered equally. Tickets will not be allocated on a first-come, first-served basis so there is no advantage to submitting your application on the first day. This is your best chance to get the tickets you want so take your time and plan your application before submitting.

By March 2011, the email blasts began to get pretty excited: The wait is almost over! Applications for London 2012 Olympic Games tickets open in just eight days’ time on Tuesday 15 March! Apply for your Olympics tickets now! You registered your interest in Olympic Games tickets. Now is the time to act! In the summer of 2012 the superstars of world sport are coming to the UK. Now is your best chance to be able to say ‘I was there’. This is your best chance to get the tickets you want and be a part of the greatest show on earth! Remember applications are open for a limited time only. (You can practically hear the last line being read at great speed like a legal disclaimer.)

Fourteen months on, we finally submitted our application, and received confirmation: This email is from the London 2012 Ticketing team, confirming that your ticket application has been received. I practically rubbed my hands with glee. As days turned to weeks, I discovered the bigger question was, in the immortal words of Whitney Houston, “How will I know?” All the monthly, sometimes weekly, email blasts egging me on during the pre-application wait stopped cold turkey and I found the post-application wait almost unbearable. Email updates assured us we’d know by May. Payment would be taken between May 10 and June 10. No, just on May 16th. Actually, almost all transactions will be taken by May 31st. The newspapers practically crowed that if you hadn’t had money debited from your account by May 31st you were among the unlucky. The ticketing website countered some transactions might still go through right up until June 10th. When both June 1st and 10th arrived without email, fanfare or a debit transaction, I considered it game over.

So, who had been successful? Tales were rehashed in the media like the man who hedged his bets by applying for $58,000 worth of tickets and received, by the committee’s grace and glory, some $17,000 worth of seats - and had to go cap in hand to his bank to increase his credit limit. Two others successfully secured tickets to the popular men’s 100m final after applying for only that one event. As the madding crowd called foul, the organizing committee came up with strategies for 2nd and 3rd shots at the remaining tickets. (Why, exactly, there would be any unallocated tickets at this time, I’m not sure.) No doubt the brains that dreamt up the oddly complicated approach – albeit in an admirable pursuit of fairness and equality - are wishing they’d stuck to the basics. Suddenly, first come, first served, with a cap on the total number of per person tickets looks pretty reasonable.

This week, I nearly choked on a new London 2012 Ticketing email: Congratulations! We are delighted to confirm that you have been allocated some or all of the London 2012 Olympic Games tickets you applied for. You have been charged only for the tickets you have been allocated. We will be in touch prior to 24 June 2011 to confirm the details of which tickets you have been allocated.

There hasn’t been a debit charge posted to my bank account as yet, but I remain steadfastly an Olympic hopeful.