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Fans who missed out will be offered first-come, first-served second chance to get seats at less popular events
Hundreds of thousands of sports fans learned at midnight they had failed to get any tickets for the London Olympics and must now scramble on a first-come, first-served basis for unsold seats at less popular events such as handball and basketball in a "second chance" sale.
Games organisers were overwhelmed with applications, with more than 1m bids for tickets to the opening ceremony and the men's 100m final.
Ticketing computers held more than 1,500 separate ballots for over-subscribed Olympic sessions, with the typical applicant receiving fewer than a third of the tickets requested. Money for tickets has been debited from applicants' accounts and the deadline for the last few transactions has now passed.
There were 20m applications from 1.8m people for the 6.6m tickets available to the public via the controversial ballot. Organisers confirmed that at least 250,000 fans had been left ticketless, but they would be contacted by email and offered an "exclusive window" later this month to buy tickets for events where demand was relatively low.
Events where seats will still be available are mostly for ball games in large stadiums, such as football, volleyball, handball, basketball and hockey. But sessions in smaller arenas, such as the 6,000-seat velodrome have virtually sold out.
Over the next week, organisers will also contact people who were successful in the ballot, but whose payment has been rejected. More than 100 applicants had their purchases declined after a mistake by Barclaycard, in which the transactions were flagged as suspicious. Many more failed because their card was subsequently lost or stolen.
Although there are still 422 days until the start of the 2012 London Olympics, the games are already giving a much-needed boost to Britain's flagging economy, according to James Knightley, economist at ING Financial Markets.
The £400m-worth of tickets sold through the ballot will be treated as consumption in the current quarter, rather than in the period the Olympics actually takes place. Together with overseas sales, it is likely to produce an Olympic bounce of about 0.2% in the second quarter GDP figures, said Knightley.
Sports fans who have been successful in the ballot will hear which events they have tickets for by June 24. But anger is rising among those who failed to get tickets, with many accusing organisers of handing out too many seats to sponsors and officials.
Organisers say just 8% of the 8.8m tickets have been set aside for sponsors, but some events have a corporate allocation of 50%. Officials refuse to say how many of the tickets for the opening ceremony have been reserved for VIPs. "All we are able to say at this stage is that there are as many tickets at £20.12 as there are at £2,012," said a spokeswoman.
Two million tickets to the Paralympics will go on sale between 9-30 September. Only after that process has been completed will any unsold tickets to the Olympics go on general sale to the public, probably in early December.
