At the outset I must reveal that I was fortunate enough to receive Olympic tickets for Hockey, Handball, Football and Beach Volleyball (14 tickets in all) from the opening ballot. Very lucky yes, but I would also claim I played the system fairly well with my initial choices.
It is also worth pointing the overall success of the initial sale, with 23 sports sold out a year in advance. To quote the former IOC Director Michael Payne, “In the 115-year history of the Games, there has not been such a successful Olympic ticket programme” with a “democratic ticket distribution process…that will become a model for future Games.”
Compare this to the swathes of empty seats in Athens 20004, the Beijing 2008 ticket queues and questionable distribution process, or even Sydney 2000, which sold 92% of tickets.
Worse still, we might even look at the 2011 ICC Cricket World Cup (the ICC are currently investigating how thousands of World Cup tickets allegedly ended up on the black market or in the hands of VIPs, police or politicians) or the 2010 FIFA World Cup, which just months before the tournament had only sold 2.1m of 2.9m tickets, and 60,000 of 308,000 hospitality packages.
2011 ICC Cricket World Cup fans
Nevertheless, amidst the furore and attempts by LOCOG to ensure as many people get a chance in the second and third round of London 2012 ticket sales, it is worth asking; could there have been a better way?
The answer may lie with 2011’s second most divisive process, the Alternative Vote (AV), the proposed change to the UK voting system that was so comprehensively crushed earlier this year. Or at least a version of it - I can hear electoral experts finding many flaws in my definition.
AV involves choosing your candidates in order of preference. AV when applied to the Olympic ticketing process could have seen the public choose their events by priority order.
An explanation: Apply for your Olympics tickets in rank order. The ballots for everyone’s first choice are held. Anyone who is unsuccessful is moved down into their second choice tickets ballot. And so on to third, fourth, fifth choice…
For example, you may have chosen four tickets to the 100m Final Athletics session as your first choice (along with 1m other people). If unsuccessful in this ballot (likely), you would drop down to the ballot for your second choice, four tickets to the Beach Volleyball. If you were unlucky enough to miss out on this (also very popular) sport, your third choice of the Basketball may have come up trumps. Otherwise, worst-case scenario, your fourth and fifth choices of Handball and Football are for you.
The main advantage of this system is that, rather than a random, scattergun approach, more people would actually have ended up with the tickets they really wanted. I am sure there are Swimming or Equestrian enthusiasts exasperated with a system that may have provided them with Gymnastics, Archery or Volleyball tickets, when in fact just one session at the Aquatic Centre or Greenwich Park would have sufficed.
Under the AV system, a good proportion of people would have got his or her first or second choice tickets (excepting those seeking ridiculously oversubscribed top level Athletics, Cycling and Swimming sessions).
Clearly plenty of people may still have missed out on their top choices, but by working down through their preferences would have ended up with at least some tickets. And clearly if the demand is not strong in certain sports, you could end up with plenty of tickets as you would be placed in every ballot you applied for until all the tickets are sold.
The chief problem with the process was the message of ‘Plan Your Games’ that the public was given by LOCOG, who probably never quite envisaged the surge of demand that took place. By encouraging people to aim high, to give them nothing in return was bound to cause some ill feeling.
If proof is required for the ability of my system to have worked, it was the numbers being provided by LOCOG that sparked off my thinking.
Around 6m tickets were available, 1.8m people applied. My mathematics suggests that to be 3-4 tickets per person. And often to that person’s first or second choice sport. Not too many would have complained.
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