Heather Bailey gave up. After a year spent pursuing tickets to February's Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics through official sources, the Expedia employee from Federal Way, Wash., will put her dreams of attending a rare close-to-home Olympics in the hands of scalpers.
Jim Jeffreys got lucky -- sort of. The Seattle school administrator landed $2,100 worth of Olympic tickets, then struggled to find a way to use them in a city where basic hotels are charging more than $1,000 a night.
Ed Dooley got mad. After scoring four tickets, then giving up on lodging, the retired chief financial officer from Sequim spent the better part of a year writing letters and making angry phone calls about an Olympic ticketing and accommodations system he calls a classic, unregulated monopoly.
Dooley's conclusion: "I think they're a bunch of bandits."
Welcome to the dark side of the Olympic flame. The Games get lofty billing as a celebration of human achievement -- an amateur sports event that builds community and transcends class barriers. It seemed a natural fit for progressive Vancouver, where organizers promised the most fan-friendly Games ever.
The truth: The public will be a bit player in the made-for-TV drama unfolding in Vancouver and Whistler. Consider:
* In spite of record demand, fans seeking tickets to premier events such as medal-round hockey games will have access to only about one-quarter of the seats normally available in Vancouver's 19,000-seat General Motors Place. Sponsors, media and VIPs take the lion's share.
* Frustrated Northwest fans, who produced the largest ticket demand outside Canada, are lucky to have landed any tickets at all. Only 2 percent of the 1.6 million total -- about 35,000 tickets -- were initially reserved by Vancouver organizers for the U.S. public. For the gold-medal men's hockey game, America got 76 seats.
* Fans lucky enough to get tickets can find themselves frozen out on lodging. The 20,000 most-desirable hotel rooms in Vancouver and Whistler were set aside long ago for corporate sponsors and other officials -- at relative bargain prices.
* One private travel monopoly, CoSport/Jet Set Sports of New Jersey, was granted nearly three times as many tickets as the U.S. general public. The companies place many of those tickets in luxury hotel packages that range from about $5,000 per person into the millions of dollars for corporate clients.
All of this leaves athletes' families, as in past Olympics, battling for the few remaining rooms and extra tickets when prices peak, just before the Feb. 12-28 Games.
When Vancouver won the Olympic bid in 2003, a stench of corruption still lingered in the Olympic world from the trial of two Salt Lake City Organizing Committee members accused of bribing International Olympic Committee members to win the Games for Utah.
From the start, Vancouver pledged to host a Games more open and affordable.
"Feelings in Vancouver were that 'this is a different city, and we are going to host a kinder and gentler Olympics,'¬ " says author and Olympics critic Helen Lenskyj, of the University of Toronto. But much of the plan used to gain public support for the Games has proved to be wishful thinking. Organizers promised gold-medal men's hockey game tickets costing as little as $29, with a top price of $277. They actually sold for $350 to $775 in Canada this year.
Those early price estimates are now called "irrelevant" by Caley Denton, ticketing chief of the Vancouver Organizing Committee. The reasons for the price jump are varied, but record demand plays a role. When tickets first went on sale in October 2008, fan requests were nearly five times higher than early orders for the 2002 Salt Lake Olympics.
On top of that comes the little- understood, harsh reality of Olympic seating: Roughly a quarter of the potential seating area of every Olympic venue is fenced off as work space for broadcast gear, officials and reporters.
What's left for seating in each arena is not clear; VANOC refuses to say just how many tickets will be sold at any venue. But Seattle Times reporting provides some estimates: At the 19,000-seat GM Place, some 14,000 tickets will be sold. Depending on the event, 30 to 70 percent of those will go to sponsors, VIPs and Olympic officials. That leaves about 9,800 for fans, at best. At worst, for the men's gold-medal hockey game, fans get about 4,200 seats. The same math applies to other Olympic venues.
The resulting ticket crunch in winter-sports-crazed Canada leaves organizers with the blessing of likely sellouts -- as well as the burden of disgruntled fans.
The Olympics' long-established ticketing structure favors the well-connected and the well-to-do. First in line is "Olympic Family," which includes IOC members, sponsors, broadcasters and other media and sports-federation officials. It also includes local governments, as well as dozens of national committees.
More than a year ago, before the public had its first chance, Olympic Family members were allowed to pay face-value prices for up to 480,000 tickets.
Beyond that, details of who got what are slim. VANOC, like most of the Olympic world, is a private, not-for-profit corporation, and not subject to open-records laws. Its board meetings are closed; nearly all its business is conducted in private.
When VANOC pitched the Games to the public, which would be asked to contribute hundreds of millions of tax dollars, it repeatedly pledged to conduct its business with "openness and transparency." But it keeps secret most details of its Olympic ticket program. VANOC wouldn't even say how many tickets went to each country. And it is especially guarded about discussing preferential treatment granted to sponsors.
The only glimpses behind the ticketing curtain come from sponsors that happen to be public agencies. The city of Vancouver bought $377,000 worth of tickets, including 100 opening ceremony and 100 closing ceremony tickets at up to $1,100 each, a records request reveals. The B.C. Lottery, B.C. Hydro and the Insurance Corporation of British Columbia together bought $1.4 million worth of tickets.
VANOC declined to release any of its sponsor contracts. But The Times did obtain the breakdown of sponsor perks from a VANOC staff member. Top-tier sponsors -- such as Coca-Cola -- that have invested at least $50 million can purchase up to 250 tickets per day. Lower-tier sponsors can buy 30 to 60 tickets per day.
The Games' upper crust also gets priority buses, SUVs, designated parking and places in the Olympic torch relay -- 20 spots for each top sponsor. In addition, they get a highly prized commodity: the best hotel rooms in Vancouver and Whistler. Some sponsors are entitled to up to 200 hotel rooms per day. Even better, they will pay a flat rate for their rooms, no matter what size, several Vancouver hotel managers said.
IOC President Jacques Rogge and other higher-ups staying at the upscale, waterfront Westin Bayshore, for example, will be charged only about $250 U.S. a night for suites.
Comparable rooms -- if they were even available -- likely would go for three or four times that to the general public, current rates suggest.
Jeffreys, a longtime Olympic fan from Seattle, can vouch for that.
"I knew I was going to be extorted because it was one ticket agency, but I didn't expect the lack of access to hotels, and the costs," said Jeffreys, a Franklin High School administrator who wanted to treat his wife, Suna Gurol, and their 8-year-old son, Kai, to that once-in-a-lifetime Olympic experience.
Comments