London 2012: New glitch disappoints ticket hunters

Faster, higher, stronger...? Oh, if only. The Olympics motto might apply to its athletes but as far as its ticketing application goes, its slower, lower, weaker. Just 48 hours after the second ticket ballot got underway, the organisers of the 2012 London Games admitted yesterday that around 15,000 people who thought they had won the race to secure tickets to next year's Olympics haven't in fact struck gold.

When the ticket hotline opened at 6am on Friday so many people applied for the 2.3m tickets up for grabs that the system couldn't keep up with demand. First the website crashed, and then fans were able to book seats for events that had in fact already sold out.

According to the BBC, the website was unable to cope with the number of people trying to buy tickets on a first-come, first-served basis and it proved impossible to update the website fast enough. As a result, punters who punched the air with joy on Friday morning are now stamping their feet in frustration.

The BBC quoted one such applicant, Welshman Andy Pritchard, as saying: "I was on the application website bang on 6 o'clock on Friday to make my application and... had some confidence that I had been successful." But then on Sunday Pritchard received an email saying that he'd missed out on all the events for which he'd applied.

A spokesman for the London Organising Committee of the Olympic Games (Locog) preferred to focus on the positives, saying: "Over 150,000 applications have been processed since Friday for around 850,000 tickets. Just under 90 per cent received tickets, subject to payment. Around 10 per cent have not been successful due to the massive demand during the first two hours of sales where 10 sports sold out, some within 15 minutes."

By Friday evening 18 of the 24 events for which tickets had been available were sold out, while two more sports – boxing and weightlifting – went the same way on Saturday. As of Monday morning there are still tickets going for football, volleyball and wrestling. For all those still without tickets, Locog told them not to despair. "Over a million new tickets will be offered to the British public next year from contingency seats, once venues are tested and licensed."

In the meantime, disheartened Britons have been warned not to look elsewhere in their desperation for tickets, and run the risk of being ripped off by fake websites. "People should keep to genuine sources of tickets, otherwise tickets might fail to turn up or people may be denied entry," said Nicola Schofield of Nottinghamshire Trading Standards.

The official London 2012 website lists all authorised ticket resellers in the hope of preventing any repetition of what happened before the 2008 Olympics when scam sites cheated scores of people. Among those duped were the parents of gold medallist swimmer Rebecca Adlington, who spent nearly £1,100 buying tickets from a website only to discover later they were fake. ·