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By Angeliki Derveni
When the Athens Games in 2004, which were organised according to all IOC and visitors to the Games, in the best possible manner, London ran a terribly offensive campaign on posters claiming Athens would never have venues ready, and the 2004 Olympics would be a shambles. Well the Athens 2004 Olympics were not a shambles, its what came after that has made us Greeks look stupid, the mismanagement of Government debt. However it is ironic that London, which has been claiming that the London Games will be the best Games in austere times, has admitted to a new clanger.
Chaos erupted when thousands of fans of synchronised swimming were told that organisers oversold thousands of tickets for the upcoming event in the London 2012 Olympics. In numbers, 20,000 extra tickets were sold instead of the remaining 10,000 available seats. Whatever next?
The thousands of ticket-holders who had bought extra tickets were contacted by the organisers and asked to return the tickets or exchange them for tickets in other sports, including athletics, unsynchronised swimming and track cycling.
The London Organising Committee of the Olympic Games apologised for the disruption caused saying it was due to a human data-inputting error and assured it would not happen again. However, it was not immediately clear whether the committee discovered oversold tickets in other events too.
10,000 too many tickets which were sold for synchronised swimming even though none were available. This admission is just too big a banana skin, an embarrassing error for the to date highly controlled media campaign of the organisers. Let's see what the next cock-up will be before the summer. Due to this blunder fewer tickets will be available in the contingency sale later this year. The alternative tickets will come from the pot of one million for all events that are on sale in May. photo credit: Natalie Mitrides (Sebastian Coe head of the London Olympic Committee)
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