Timeline: ticket sales for the Vancouver Games

A brief timeline of individual Olympic ticket sales in the U.S. and Canada.

2008

SEPTEMBER: Tickets issued to B.C. governments, sponsors and "Olympic Family" members.

OCT. 3 TO NOV. 7: CoSport launches first-phase U.S. tickets sales by accepting ticket requests from customers who have pre-registered on the CoSport Web site.

OCT. 3 TO NOV. 7: Vancouver Organizing Committee (VANOC) begins first-phase ticket sales for Canadian residents by accepting ticket requests through its Web site.

OCTOBER: VANOC allocates 25,000 tickets for individual sales to U.S. public. An additional 10,000 will be set aside at a later, unknown date. Jet Set Sports adds another 15,000 tickets from its sponsor allotment to the CoSport individual sales pool bringing the total U.S. allotment to date to about 48,500.

DEC. 1: Canadian buyers begin receiving ticket-sales confirmations. Games organizers announce record demand for tickets.

DEC. 12-22: VANOC conducts a second online sale of tickets to Canadians who didn't purchase them during the initial request-only sale.

2009

JAN. 6: CoSport begins notifying U.S. fans of ticket fulfillments. Many are disgruntled, saying they had requested dozens of tickets but received only a handful, or none at all. CoSport cites record demand. The company says 40 percent of its initial ticket requests came from Washington state, and about 55 percent of customers received at least some tickets. Overall, the company received 14,179 separate orders for 166,800 tickets. It sold 48,433 — most of its ticket allotment up to that time.

JAN. 29: CoSport announces an additional ticket sale to be conducted online starting Feb. 5 for buyers registered for the first sale only, does not announce numbers available.

FEB. 5: CoSport's computers crash; few ticket sales are completed. Later, the company admits to problems with its credit-card checkout process.

MAY 6: CoSport announces a new "Phase 2" ticket sale, first-come first-served, for May 14. CoSport says the tickets came from an additional allotment from VANOC and another transfer from its sister company, travel-packager Jet Set Sports.

MAY 14: Many U.S. fans finally get tickets. Most ticket categories are sold out within 24 hours. CoSport later says 31,108 tickets were sold during the first 75 minutes, and 34,017 were sold altogether. CoSport announces that nearly half of sales in this round were to customers in the Pacific Northwest.

JUNE 4: An unknown number of new tickets in nearly all categories appears, with no fanfare or explanation, on CoSport's Web site. U.S. fans snap them up.

JUNE 6-JULY 31: VANOC sells remaining tickets online to Canadians.

SEPTEMBER: CoSport sells an additional 10,000 tickets to U.S. public. It says it sold or will sell about 90,000 U.S. tickets.

OCTOBER: CoSport announces additional sale of tickets to premium events as part of "Hospitality Packages" combining an event ticket with a day pass to a hospitality center with drinks and big-screen TVs. The package for the men's gold-medal hockey game, ticket face price $775, is $3,800.

NOV. 7: VANOC computer system crashes, preventing the final sale of 100,000 tickets to Canadians. Final ticket sale is rescheduled for Nov. 14.