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Site crashes as new batch of 2012 tickets go on sale
Most of the new tickets are for the football – but you could see Jessica Ennis do her thing
On your marks... heh, not so fast! At 6.0 am this morning the organisers of the 2012 London Olympics put 2.3 million more tickets up for grabs online. Needless to say, by about 6.01 am the site had already crashed.
The new sale, open for 10 days, follows the debacle of the first round of ticket sales. In that shambolic affair only 700,000 applicants received any tickets at all, while more than 1.2m potential punters – 64 per cent – were left as glum-faced as a British beach volleyball team.
This time the tickets are available on a first-come first-served basis.
But before the 1.9 million registered applicants get too carried away at the thought of watching Usain Bolt go for the glory in the 100m, there are a couple of caveats. Of the 2.3m tickets on sale from today, a whopping 1.7m are to watch the football.
So unless you really want to sit and gawp at a bunch of unknown footballers from Honduras slug it out with a bunch of unknown footballers from Gabon there'll be approximately 1.9m registered applicants scrambling for the remaining 600,000 tickets, which include 44 medal events.
The 100m finals for men and women are sold out, as are 21 events in total including diving and gymnastics. The opening and closing ceremonies are also fully booked. But there are still tickets available to watch Jessica Ennis in the women’s heptathlon on August 3 (not only is Ennis British, she’s also rather good having won the 2009 world championship title), the first round of the men's 400m hurdles and the women's 100m qualifying heats.
Among sports struggling to tickle the average Brit's fancy are Greco-Roman wrestling - a bit like watching a fight in an Essex pub only involving leotards and not shellsuits – handball, judo and volleyball. There are also a few tickets left for the beach volleyball, rowing and basketball finals.
Even if you aren't one of the 1.9m registered applicants there is still an outside chance – roughly the same odds as Team GB fielding a united football team – of picking up tickets if you log on and register yourself as a late applicant.
When the second ballot closes on July 3, those who were successful in the first round will get another chance to buy tickets from July 8 to July 17. Any tickets still left after that will then be made available to late applicants, though by then you'll most probably be scrabbling around for tickets to see Tracey Emin trying to explain the thinking behind her Olympic poster. ·
