Many of you who applied for Olympic tickets won't have been surprised at the news on Monday that more than half of all the applications were unsuccessful. Around a million of the 1.8m people who requested tickets have got nothing.
This poses the greatest challenge that Lord Coe and his team have faced since London was awarded the Games in 2005. They have to manage the disappointment of the vast number of people who'd dreamed of watching the men's 100 metres final inside the Olympic stadium, but now know that they'll have to settle for seeing it on television instead.
That, of course, was always going to be the case. We are a nation of sports lovers. It was never going to be possible to build a stadium large enough to seat even a fraction of those who wanted to be there. I've been given some figures which illustrate the extraordinary level of demand for 2012 tickets.
There will be 650 sessions across all sports, with an average of four price categories at each one. That means that there were a total of about 2500 different options for people to consider when they applied. More than 1500 of those pricing categories across the 650 sessions were oversubscribed. Some people who chose 'bankers' like early rounds of hockey, weightlifting and handball have been left disappointed.
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I can also reveal that the average application was for 12 tickets at a total average cost of �500. So, one million people who had offered to pay �500 each have ended up with nothing. No wonder there's such a feeling of frustration amongst those who missed out.
All is not lost, though, if you've tried and, so far failed, to get your hands on any tickets. Of the 6.6m available to the public, more than a million remain. Many are for football, but there are others available which will get you onto the Olympic Park.
Admittedly, the majority of the tickets which haven't been sold for the more popular sports will be in the higher price categories, but the London Organising Committee of the Olympic Games (Locog) are still expecting great interest when the second round of sales begins.
The million people who missed out first time will have priority when tickets go back on sale. They'll receive an email next week explaining how the process will work. The fact that there are so many of them will pose problems for Ticketmaster, who run the ticketing system, as the second stage will be done on a first come first served basis.
If all one million people log on at the same time then it could pose obvious problems, comparable to the demand for the Take That concerts, but Locog are confident that the system is sufficiently robust.
And if you're one of the unlucky million, you don't have long to wait. You'll be sent a code which will enable you to access the ticketing system, and I'm assured that the sale will begin before the end of June. There will be a window of around ten days, and then those who received some, but not all, of their application will be invited to re-join the process. It's likely that by this stage nearly all of the tickets will have been sold.
Meanwhile, many of the disappointed applicants continue to head to official European ticket agents, who are obliged to make their allocations available to residents of all countries in the EU.
For those of you who registered with France's site by the deadline of midnight last night, I have good news and bad news.
The good news is that only around 4,000 of you managed to do so, and you'll have exclusive access when the French tickets are put on sale on June 13th. The bad news is that many of those tickets will be sold in conjunction with a hotel room, so if you don't need accommodation then you might have to end up with an unwanted extra cost. For tickets to the best events some people are likely to decide that that's a price worth paying.
Have you been lucky, or are you one of the disappointed million? Do you accept that Locog had an impossible job and that there simply isn't a system that could have kept everybody happy, or do you have other ideas?
Whatever your experience so far in the London 2012 ticket process, I will be interested to read your views.
Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/jamespearce/2011/06/theres_still_hope_for_the_one.html
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