Olympic Agony

Friday morning, nine o’clock. I was pouring my post-school run coffee when I received a text from my father: ‘The Olympic ticket website has opened!’ I nearly choked, abandoned the myriad urgent things on my to do list (bills, work and returned phone calls could wait) and plunked myself squarely in front of the laptop. The task would need undivided attention. The kind that involves breaking a cardinal rule (one involving a small child and a television set) so I could bash away feverishly at the keyboard like a maestro possessed.

The Olympics London 2012 has been plagued with controversy and frustration ever since the ill-conceived national ticket lottery made winners of a few, and losers of more than two thirds of applicants. The newspapers have been all over it and my fellow countrymen range, somewhat narrowly, from utterly frustrated to simply unimpressed. It’s been twenty-one months since I signed up for the critical updates from the official Olympic website. I watched it crash and fumble during the lottery submission period. I waited on tenterhooks as deadlines passed or were rescheduled. And just when the ticket resale period was about to open in December, Locog, the London Olympic Committee, psyched us out by saying it wouldn’t open ticket resales until April 2012. April, with the games starting in July? Surely someone was havin’ a larf.

I pounced on tickets and scoured the website for 90 minutes straight, madly texting my husband at work in the OR to get his thumbs up for picks in men’s diving, beach volleyball, athletics and gymnastics. It was unbelievable – tickets were available for almost every event, some in higher price brackets than I’d originally chosen, others available in almost every price tier. There were even tickets for the opening and closing ceremonies. Everything looked peachy until checkout. No tickets were protected in your Ticketmaster cart until you actually clicked through to checkout and with every attempt to buy my screen only flashed up, “No tickets matching your requested items can be found.”

I was flipping out. Back I went to the available dates and tickets and picked one event, two tickets and went to Checkout. Not available. Over and over again. Every event that showed available tickets would come up as none available before the entire site seemingly crashed. The little Olympic icon – (I can’t decide if it more closely resembles a shattered Union flag or the glow-in-the-dark numberless Quartz watch face I owned when I was about twelve) -- that spins while it processes your request, wound around endlessly until it had the decency to time out with an unhelpful message. To paraphrase, the ticket resale site had been suspended until Ticketmaster could sort out the mess.

So where exactly did the problem lie? People attempting to offload tickets found they were taken from their accounts but did not appear online until several hours later. Tickets that were actually showing up continued to be listed as available sometimes up to three hours after they had been sold. Without any protection over the tickets in a buyer’s cart – something that’s typically managed at theatre ticket sites with a two or three minute hold while you decide whether to finalize your purchase – others were able to purchase the very tickets that were ostensibly safely stashed in your cart. The issues go on and on. The site was overwhelmed by the massive crush of people that hit the site the second doors metaphorically opened at 9am on Friday morning, Greenwich Mean Time. Given all the hype and hoopla over the lottery system, and the millions of Brits hoping to score tickets, it doesn’t seem possible Ticketmaster could have envisioned anything other than a web-based version of the Running of the Bulls. Did they really think people would be casually taking a look-see intermittently until the site closes on February 3rd or patiently waiting to get their hot little mitts on, well, just about anything they could?

As of Tuesday this week, the official site is still down and the media is blowing up with a mixture of howling guffaws and vicious lambasts. If the little matter of ticket issuance has been this much of a fiasco, can we expect the London transport plans to go any more smoothly? Meanwhile, the wait is brewing the perfect Molotov cocktail with equal parts of anticipation, trepidation and desperation. Whatever Ticketmaster is doing to fix the mess, they’d better be prepared for the onslaught -- or they’ll be the ones for the high jump.