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Yes! Finally! We’ve won not one, but two whole gold medal events. But that’s not all that’s been happening in a day of Lolympics. Good ol’Boris, hilariously, got stuck hanging from a zip-line waving flags, while Beats actually managed to beat the Olympic brand police. Eight badminton players also got caught fixing matches and banned, and you can now see what could happen to your legs as a cyclist (it’s not pretty).
- Boris Stuck Hanging Mid-Air on a Zip-Line Is the Biggest Olympic Attraction of the Day
- Boris Vs The Dark Knight Rises
- Guns Are Just too Slow For Olympic Sprinters
- Twitter Backs Down Over NBC-Critic Blocking
- Beats Beat the Olympic Brand Police With Ambush Marketing
- Can’t Get to the Olympic Park? Build One Out of Lego Instead
- We’ve Finally Won Some Gold
- Daley Wasn’t the Only One Getting a Torrent of Twitter Abuse
- Eight Badminton Players Disqualified For Match Fixing
- This Is Why You Don’t Want to Be a Sprint Cyclist
- More Than One In 10 Seats Sold Are Left Empty
Image credit: Olympics sprinter and Troll from Shutterstock, Twitter
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Technically we got 3 gold medals but we won gold in two events.
Very true. Gold medal events then
With regard to the empty seats, aside from the problem that VIPs aren’t showing up leaving empty seats a lot are still too expensive even if they are reclaimed.
But the catch is that if they reduce them to fill them then the people sitting in the seat next to the now reduced seat could complain and demand a refund “I paid £150 to sit with this view, and the person next to me only paid £75!” therefore a refund of thousands may be in order. Additionally if you do reduce tickets and then say “sorry we’re not refunding the difference” there is a separate problem in that the people who paid £75 for the original allocation will be sitting in worse seats than the people who got them reduced making it unfair that the views for the same price are different.
So LOCOG can only do one thing and once reclaimed they have to be sold at the equivalent price they would have been in the original allocation. But then people still aren’t buying them because they don’t want to spend £145 on weightlifting tickets! Therefore there will continue to be empty seats with little chance of filling them.
And don’t get me started on the “we’ll bring in students” thing. The military thats fine, they’re being paid not a lot (friend in the navy working security for the games for £3.50 an hour when the G4S guys are on £11.50) and they have served their country in some atrocious environments so I feel its the least we can do to let them see some amazing sport when they’ve dropped in at the last second to ‘rescue’ the games.
Rant Over
Another problem is that some of the corporate tickets have been given to competition winners, who live all over the country and don’t feel the urge to travel down/up to the smoke to see some minor sport or even a major one they don’t like. The rules of the competition may forbid resale, so the seats go empty.
That’s if they’re even won! Cadbury’s are still advertising the win a golden ticket for the games so they could still be out there!
Theatre ticket sales operate under the same principle. So do airline tickets. I don’t see a problem with paying £150 and making sure you have a ticket compared to someone who’s paid more or less for the same thing if they risked it by turning up without a ticket.
I think if you’re not going to use your ticket, you should call a number and release it back on the market. If you don’t, and don’t turn up, you have to pay the face value of the ticket again.