So on this day next year the London Olympics will begin. As usual the government publicity machine, the BBC, is playing it up wheeling out all their former athletes who are now BBC presenters to crank up the excitement. Only one presenter however, dared to ask Lord Seb Coe the burning question...'did he feel that the public were disconnected from these games?' As usual His Lordship gave the predictable response and politically pointed out the 'legacy' that the Games would leave.
Fifty per cent of the buildings would be converted to 'affordable accommodation' after the games. My question is what about the other 50%? Who will be making money from them? The ticket allocation still rumbles on. Clearly the British public were all but excluded from the glamour events by a cockeyed system that demanded payment but could not guarantee what you would be allowed to see. This was a good way to fill up the more mundane events but who wants to watch a football match between two obscure nations?
I hear that the parents of some of our sportspeople have not managed to get tickets for the very event that their sons/daughters are in. All these years of support and this is their reward. It could only happen in Broken Britain. I have blogged before that I am an Olympic fanatic, I love it, but this ticket scandal has tarnished it for me. I want to see the Taxpayers given a fair deal but I reckon when those in the shadows are compelled to walk into the sunlight and take their seats we will see who managed to beat the system. You can bet quite heavily that they will be senior police officers, NHS executives, quango members, politicians and Town Hall fat cats. The very people who always beat the system.
It would make an ideal crusade for an investigative journalist. The headline could read 'So who did get the Tickets?'
2 comments:
Yes - and the program on the BBC was excruciatung in its awfulness last night.
Perhaps the most telling moment was when the question was asked, "Why did you use a ballot system that gave my neighbour three evening athletic sessions and me, none" (from a lifelong Athetics fan), and for the only(? - from what I watched) time, they asked for the next question directly with the caveat that both would be answered.
Of course only the second one was. Classical stage management at its best...
And, when you have Zaha Hadid saying that even she does not have a ticket for her own pool, then you know that the whole LOCOG edifice does not have even a single person whose job involves common sense and fairness.
But what really gets me is the use of the 2.3 million football tickets in to say how many tickets are
available. Given that this tournament is primarily U23 then, uniquely, it does not fit the Olympic mold, and is an anachronism (in my opinion it shouldn't be there at all).
The mere fact that LOCOG regularly incorporates this ridiculously large number into their announcements tells me that they actively want to mislead the public at large. Shame on you.
The honourable action would have been to to state the total number available for all the other sports, with football as an adjunct - and then only mentioned on occasions and in passing.
Tks for your interest. Agree with every word. They have actively mislead the British public and every time Coe appears and is approached on this subject he looks very shifty. I am amazed at how many large corporates are running competitions with Olympic tickets as prizes! How did they get the tickets? What angers me is how the public just went along with it! We should be boycotting these games and shaming LOCOG!
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