Quote Of The Day

"Victory goes to the player who makes the next-to-last mistake - Chessmaster Savielly Grigorievitch Tartakower (1887-1956)"

Wednesday, May 30, 2012

Olympics Tickets...

I'm a big fan of the Olympics coming to London. I don't care about the cost (we can afford it), the sponsors (it keeps what costs there are down) or the disruption (I go to the footie and experience every fortnight first hand 60,000 people descending on a stadium - it's no biggy.)

I was excited when London applied. Excited when London got it. And have grown more excited as the time approaches.

Now all I needed to do was try for some tickets.

So I registered my interest last year and applied in the first round of ticket sales. I'd chanced an arm and applied for a dozen different sessions, all the sports I wanted to see, and came away with just one - Beach Volleyball. Worse still, winning those tickets made me ineligible to apply again in the second round. I did log on for that second round but on my parents behalf to get them some tickets (they had missed out completely in the first round and didn't fancy getting up at 6am to try again) and was marginally more successful for them.

However I had to wait another 10 months until last week for the chance of applying again on my own behalf and after missing various other rounds of sales wasn't expecting much luck. I logged on at the appropriate time at 11am on Wednesday 23rd May (oh, I'd had that date in my diary for weeks) and imagine my surprise when I discovered that there were loads of tickets still available. Almost every event and venue I wanted to go to from last year still had tickets to buy. So I selected all the original events that I might have possibly wanted waited. And waited. And waited. The London 2012 ticket web site was working but had a really annoying queueing system that counted down from 15 minutes before it could confirm whether you'd been successfully or not. The first few came back with the frustrating message, "No tickets found." Grrr.

But I persevered. Trying again and again. Like those Olympic athletes I wasn't going to give up. For some events I applied 8 or 9 times in a row - getting slightly more disheartened with each failure. But after an hour or so I got my first event. A diving event. Yay! So I tried again with another event - this time Artistic Gymnastics - and sure enough that came back too. I was on a roll. I repeated again and again often getting the "No tickets found" message but I had the bit between my teeth.

Eventually they all started coming back as winners. In fact after almost three hours of trying I had secured tickets for all but one of the original sessions I wanted to go to!

Success!

So now I'm going to watch 11 different sports in 13 different sessions at numerous Olympic venues - two being diving finals, one being the Paralympic Games Opening Ceremony and a few trips up the Orbit to boot.

Can't wait.

PS: As of today there are still Olympics tickets available! Check out.

1 comment:

  1. ‎*When I say 'we can afford it' - bad choice of words - I'm not trying to be offhand - I just don't buy into all this ConDem austerity 'we're all in it together' clap-trap introducing what amounts to criminal cuts to basic benefits and services to those most in need in our society today. It's not 'either/or' in my opinion it's fucking 'both'! We can afford the Olympics, we can afford the NHS, we can afford social care, we can afford a good school system, we can afford a society that looks after those most in need of our help. Apparently we can afford to go to war (£20bn for Iraq/Afghanistan as of June 2010)- so why can't we afford investment in UK infrastructure, sport, jobs AND support for those who are most in need of social care? Rant over.

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