Sold Out

Like most of London we missed out on Olympic tickets. Big bummer.

We wanted to go along and enjoy the atmospshere but the whole thing is completely sold out 15 months before the Games! We tried to be strategic and not pick the most popular sessions as soon as the ticket lottery was opened but we still missed out.

Well, all sold out for anything occuring in the Olympic Park that is. We even tried the qualifying round of the mens basketball that are being held in the temporary venue on a Sunday morning session without success.


You can still get tickets for Greco Roman wrestling and womens volleyball both of which are being at secondary venues around London which seemed to us to kind of defeat the purpose of getting in on the atmospshere. And Greco roman wrestling! I mean that sport has a real kerb appeal problem

There are also tickets to the various football stadiums around the country to see the qualifying matches but who wants to go to Newcastle or Cardiff to see a football match when you dont even know who it is you will be seeing!

Apart from the predictable and probably true snipping that too many tickets went to overseas Olympic Committee's and the sponsors I think that is a major achievement. Especially since there isn't yet any sort of palpable build up in the capital.

That means that about 620 out the 649 sessions across 39 sports have been sold out more than a year before the Games begin. In all over 5m tickets have been sold across all price brackets from £20 to £750. Thats £750 for a 3 hour session in the main stadium - you dont even get all day for that price. You just get Usain Bolt competing in the 100m final

Bear in mind they took everyone's money first before they told them what tickets they got. The money's in the bank first and then let everyone fight about whether they are happy with their tickets. They cant loose. Genius system

Guess I will just have to take 2 weeks off and watch it on the box.

Interestingly I have three construction projects in the East End of London that will be underway over the Olympic period and we have had to write in an Olympic clause into their contracts. Although they havenot yet released the routes of the road closures and priority lane closures that will operate during the Olympic; the sites in question are so close to the Olympic park that we are pretty sure that materials deliveries will be severely disrupted during the Games. The chaos and confusion are about to begin!

Good news is that everything seems to be on target. Unlike the Greeks!

 These two pictures give you some idea of the size of the Olympic Park site

 This pic shows the ugly temporary seating stands added to the new Olympic Pool. The building is by Zahir Hadid for those that care about that sort of thing

 This enormous building is the new Media Centre. I thought the Games were about the athletes

This is the new Athletes accomodation well on the way