Not So Synchronised Ticket Selling

Hundreds of fans who bought tickets for the synchronised swimming at the Olympic Games will have to return them.

The London Organising Committee of the Olympic Games has confirmed that four of the synchronised swimming sessions have been oversold by 10,000 tickets.

LOCOG and Ticketmaster are understood to have spent much of the Christmas holiday contacting ticketholders and offering an alternative.

This ticketing fiasco, apparently caused by going on sale before the venue seating had been configured, has turned out to be something of a bonus for about 200 people who managed to get tickets only for the synched swimming even though they’d have preferred other events.

“We thought the syncho tickets were better than nothing, but this is fantastic,” Anna Mullen from north London told the Daily Telegraph.

She will now be going – at no extra cost – to the last night of the athletics, which features such flagship events as the finals of the men’s 100-metre relay and the 5,000 metres.

The ticket process has so far proved to be one of the most controversial issues in the lead-up to the London showpiece.

It’s already attracted criticism for the way the tickets were allocated, the level of information regarding how many tickets were available, and because the system was felt to favour those prepared to front the most money for the higher-priced tickets for the top events.

LOCOG has reportedly already banked £537 million of the £670 million box office it estimated the Olympics would generate.

It still has about 1.2 million tickets, most of them for the soccer competition, which will go on sale at the beginning of April.