OLYMPIC GAMES: THOSE UNLUCKY enough to have missed out on London 2012 Olympics tickets twice may discover their fortunes have changed after organisers announced they will be given first bite at the remaining 900,000 seats on Friday morning.

Around 20,000 people are eligible for the special 31-hour sales window from 11am and will have a chance to buy four each of the thousands of tickets available for blue-riband events such as the men’s 100 metres final and the opening and closing ceremonies.

From Sunday, the one million others who were unsuccessful in the first ticket ballot in March last year and did not try to buy any in the second sales window will then have a five-day sales period to buy remaining tickets on a first-come, first-served basis.

Tickets for different sports will go on sale each day, in an attempt to minimise the difficulties that have been experienced by the Ticketmaster system in previous sales windows.

Ticketmaster’s managing director Chris Edmonds warned however that it could take 20 minutes of “queuing” and that many fans would be unsuccessful in buying tickets for the event they wanted.

The system means those who had initially been unlucky twice over will now get the chance to cherry-pick from the most prestigious events.

London 2012 chairman Sebastian Coe said: “We know thousands of sports fans were disappointed when they missed out in the initial sales period because of the massive demand for tickets. We promised we would prioritise these fans when we released the contingency tickets, which is exactly what we are doing.”

The system will, however, penalise those who missed out in the first round but were successful in eventually buying any tickets whatsoever, including football tickets in different parts of Britain, as they will have no access to the 900,000 tickets.

London 2012 chief executive Paul Deighton accepted that situation was not ideal in those cases but that it was “impossible” for the system to distinguish between tickets for different sports.