Want Olympics tickets? Most already gone

Since the beginning of friendly competition among nations, many a tear has been shed over the moving spectacle of the Olympic Games. Only recently have they begun flowing during the ticketing process.

Unprecedented demand for tickets to the Vancouver 2010 Olympics, which begin a year from Thursday, has created anger, vitriol and cries for reform.

"I wasted a minimum of three hours of my day on this fruitless project," a reader, who failed to secure Games tickets on a Web sale, grumbled on The Seattle Times' Olympics Insider Blog Friday. "I am a 51-year-old male — and I cried."

He's not alone. Vancouver's Olympics are virtually sold out, leaving fans still interested in attending little choice except to deal with online scalpers, who are legal in Canada.

The problem: Demand outstripped supply by a huge margin, which is not always the case. When 1.6 million tickets were put on sale by the Vancouver Organizing Committee (VANOC), Canadians submitted requests for more than $345 million worth over five weeks. (By comparison, U.S. fans requested $75 million worth of tickets over nine weeks before the 2002 Salt Lake Games.)

VANOC said 120 of the 170 events required lotteries. More than 140,000 tickets were requested for the men's gold-medal hockey game alone. Face value for those seats was $350 to $750 in Canada.

But Canadians turned out to be the lucky ones. U.S. fans were forced to use a ticketing agency, CoSport, which is the U.S. Olympic Committee's exclusive ticket reseller. CoSport charged Americans, on average, about 30 percent more than the Canadian face price and added $35 delivery fees.

CoSport's allotment of individual tickets for the entire United States was 48,000 — about 3 percent. The New Jersey company received 14,179 orders with requests for 166,800 individual tickets. Forty percent of those requests came from Washington state.

Only a small percentage were filled. Most fans who requested broad ranges of tickets got only a few events. Many, even those seeking tickets to less-popular events, such as Nordic combined, got nothing.

A second-phase sale of remaining tickets — CoSport would not say how many — last Thursday turned into a fiasco, with thousands of fans logging onto the company's Web site, spending hours waiting for it to respond to orders, then being dumped from the site during the credit-card purchase. Co-Sport did not respond to Times questions about what went wrong.

So what is a fan who still wants to attend the Vancouver Games — the closest the Olympic flame is likely to ever come to Seattle — left to do?

Two options: Buy early, through an online reseller. But be prepared to dig deep. Online dealers such as stubhub.com were advertising a wide range of Games tickets this week: Opening ceremonies ($3,300 to $5,500), men's downhill ($244 to $500), short-track speedskating ($135 to $600), women's figure skating ($432 to $1,650) and others.

But VANOC warns that it's easy to be had on the open-ticket market. No tickets have been printed or distributed. So you are buying only a "guarantee."

Fans could choose to wait until the Games draw closer, perhaps even traveling to Vancouver at Games time on the chance that prices will drop, as they often do, just before an event.

Or, as a last resort, fans can get creative. Carol Oldham, of Forth Worth, Texas, plans an Olympic pilgrimage of her own — to Seattle. A group of five to 10 like-minded, rabid short-track speedskating fans, most without tickets, are planning to meet in Seattle, rent a hotel, seek out a sports bar and cheer their lungs out for the likes of local skaters Apolo Ohno and J.R. Celski. (They travel to competitions and wear T-shirts that read, "UnAPOLOgetic.")

It's still an Olympic road trip, Oldham says — even if it stops a little short of the front gate.