VENUES COMMITMENT:NIGHTLY REVIEWS are to be held at Olympic Games venues to ensure that stadiums are not left with empty seats, London 2012 organisers promised yesterday following complaints about the gaps.
Troops brought in to secure the Games will be offered seats, as will teachers and children living near the east London Olympic Park, said Lord Sebastian Coe, who is head of the London organisers, in a bid to defuse the row.
Olympic sponsors were initially blamed for the debacle. However it appears that many of the seats were left unfilled by Olympic officials, members of sporting federations, athletes and the media.
Irish swimmer Barry Murphy vented his anger over the empty spaces for the swimming competition: “Hundreds of empty seats again in the aquatic centre. My parents would’ve given an arm and leg to get in yesterday as would the parents today.”
Faye Sultan, the first Kuwaiti woman to represent her country in an Olympic swimming event, expressed her shock: “Empty seats at the Olympics! And my parents can’t get tickets to watch me swim! Ridiculous.”
In response, Lord Coe said: “We take it seriously. I don’t want to see swathes of those seats empty and that’s why we will make sure, where we possibly can, people are in those seats when they are not used. We can clearly sell more tickets . . . We can [also] move the military in there.”
He said troops coming off duty at venues were being offered tickets as well as teachers and children in local boroughs. Lord Coe promised nightly reviews and said 1,000 extra tickets were made available for the gymnastics at North Greenwich after checks were made on Saturday night about how many of the previously-allocated tickets would be used.
Former Labour Olympics ministers Dame Tessa Jowell said anyone lucky enough to have Olympic tickets should feel “a sense of obligation” to use them. “Because if they’re not using , there are so many other people who want to.”
London 2012 organisers have said additional ticket kiosks will be established to sell tickets, even though there are 100,000 to 150,000 tickets still available for events – not including the football competition.
However, the London 2012 website remains problematic: “Okay, I can’t just spend another day constantly hitting refresh on that Olympics tickets website,” Irish comedian Dara Ó Briain complained in the afternoon.
The website does not offer a list of tickets available to the public. Consequently, those keen to buy them are obliged to search every round of the sports in which they are interested with no guarantee that unsold tickets are there to be found.
Former Labour MP Oona King, who unsuccessfully sought the party’s nomination to be mayor of London, said: “I love the Olympics, but driven insane by 2012 website – why can’t it say which tickets are available?”
Numerous events on Saturday were poorly attended, including gymnastics, volleyball, tennis, beach volleyball and swimming heats – though whether sponsors’ guests, Olympic officials or competing athletes’ team mates are most to blame remains unclear.
