2010 Olympic ticket requests to begin Friday

CoSport, the U.S. vendor for all Vancouver 2010 Olympics tickets, has issued its guidelines for ticket sales to Americans. To get a spot in line, you need to act before Nov. 7.

Beginning Friday, you can go to www.cosport.com to scan through the schedule of events and ticket price levels and fill out an official request form for individual events. To submit requests, you'll be required to set up an account on CoSport's Web site, including a credit-card number. Your credit card will not be charged. It must have an expiration date after Feb. 1, 2009.

The agency will accept requests for five weeks, through Nov. 7. The maximum request per person is 48 tickets. A separate request process for Games packages that include lodging and tickets begins at the same site Oct. 10.

A release from CoSport does not indicate what sort of premium will be added to the Vancouver organizing committee's ticket prices, nor information about handling fees. It does indicate that shipping tickets is an "optional" service that must be selected at the time of checkout for an extra fee. Tickets otherwise will be left at a will-call office in Vancouver beginning in mid-January 2010. They must be picked up by the purchaser.

The general ticket-sales process for Vancouver 2010 for Canadian residents only has already begun at the Games' official Web site, www.vancouver2010.com. All U.S. sales must be made through CoSport, however.

No way around it, unless you've got friends in Canada willing to do the legwork for you.

CoSports sales to residents of the U.S. and other countries (they also sell tickets to Austria, Australia, Bulgaria and Sweden) will be made by a random lottery. If you're a lucky winner, you'll be notified sometime in mid-December.

The agency has yet to divulge how many tickets it has been allotted. Any tickets remaining after the allocation process will be sold in spring 2009.