The Olympic Ticketing Fiasco
Bryan F had applied for a big, big number of tickets for the London Olympics, and was facing the realisation that he had failed to get any tickets whatsoever. His brother, Ryan, had also missed out. It was a source of vexation.
‘So we didn’t get tickets,’ said Bryan. ‘How do you feel about that?’
‘In a strange headspace about it, really. There’s a sense of complete failure, but there’s also anger. At everyone from Clegg downwards basically. At my worst moments, I believe the whole thing was a state-sponsored exercise in disappointment, like the Millennium Dome all over again.’
‘But we got tickets for el ‘Dome, didn’t we?’
‘Exactly. My point exactly.’
‘Ah, I understand.’
The brothers were pretty grim about how things had turned out. They had initially applied in a blizzard of excitement, believing that it was a near-certainty that they would get upwards of one ticket between them. After some deliberation, they even threw their hat in the ring for the Men’s 100m Final Ticket Ballot.
‘Coe will never expect us to apply for this, let’s do it.’
‘It’s the one everyone wants, isn’t it? Seb will assume we won’t bother to apply for such an oversubscribed event. I say, fuck him.’
‘Let’s do a double-bluff and apply, while pretending that we’re not sure whether we applied or not.’
‘I don’t really understand what you meant there, but I’m still happy to go along with this.’
They also applied, in a fit of simple greed, for some really quite expensive tickets, usually reserved for sponsors, hospitality, international sporting federations, or relatives of dictators, like Gadaffi.
‘Think on this. If we get these, Lord Sugar will courier them over to our house personally, once the cheque has cleared.’
‘I hope we get these.’
‘I meant Lord Coe, by the way, not ‘Sugar. My bad.’
‘I knew very well which of the Lords you meant, don’t sweat it.’
Come deadline day, they had each applied for tickets with a cumulative value of £1000 or slightly less. The war chest was finally empty.
‘If we get the tickets we want, I’ll stand you a drink at the bar tonight. How does that sound?’
‘But we won’t find out whether we got the tickets for a while yet.’
‘Irrelevant. Though I take your point.’
As stated above, in the end both brothers failed to get tickets. One of their friends had managed to, but things were very awkward with him and I can’t really go into details why. Annoyingly, he kind of owed them, since they had got him tickets for the Millennium Dome all those years ago.
‘I don’t think he owes us for that, does he? He hated it. That’s why things are so awkward between us now. We forced him to go and he really had a rotten day at the Dome, worse than at Tussauds.’
‘Irrelevant. Though I take your point.’
The scales had properly fallen from their eyes. Lord Coe had ceased to represent all that was finest and fairest in humankind. The brothers agreed to cancel their tickets to the O2 to see Colin Jackson give an important talk about hurdling/dancing, even though they would have had a grandstand view of the diminutive Welsh man.
Unbelievable.
