the London Olympics are inherently unfair anyway

Sport Diamond Geezer crunches the ticket allocations for Olympics 2012. Judging by what he finds, about the only sure way of getting into the opening ceremony was to be a timelord lighting the flame:
"One reason so many people haven't got any tickets is because the pool of tickets turns out to be 16% smaller than we thought it was. They've kept back some tickets to release later, for all events, "once the final seating plans for the venues are finalised." Not that they felt the need to warn us of this earlier. I find it astonishing how frequently LOCOG have dripfed selective information about the ticketing process, only to announce something later that isn't quite what we thought we believed. If Britain currently has zero faith in the fairness of the ticket allocation process, that'll be because the system has treated us like fools throughout."
As DG notes, how is it fair that with more tickets available than applicants, over half of those applicants went without?

Surely the best way would have been to have a process where applicants booked tickets in blocks on an event by event basis and then made sure that they got in to at least one of the events they asked for. Seems wrong to me that some people will be getting to see more than one, and other won't be getting to see anything at all unless its on the television, even if, and this is sure to be the case, they live next door to a venue.

But of course the London Olympics are inherently unfair anyway because most of the event is happening in London.  So even though the whole of the country has paid for some aspect of it, either through the lottery or their taxes, only a minuscule proportion of us will have the wherewithal to attend in person having been hampered by geography and the cost of travel.

The Manchester Velodrome is Olympic quality, and closer to London than the distance between some venues in China and yet we've paid for another one to be built down south.  As with the Millennium Dome and a range of other apparently national events, the decision's been taking to keep it away from the rest of us and artificially distant and no kind of bus tour can replace that.

No comments: