one way ticket...

How about an Olympic ticket update?

When last we left this saga (which you can find here and here), I was picking over the bones of getting absolutely no tickets in the ballot and marvelling at the anger and entitlement being felt by the many millions of other people who were in the same boat.

I've provisionally booked as holiday the first two weeks in August next year. I was hoping that I'd be spending that time watching a series of Olympic events at a number of different venues around London. After the ballot, it looked as though I might be watching the 53kg women's weightlifting, but precious little else. Never mind, I thought, I am still going to take that time off and just enjoy the games with my friends, even if we are only watching them on the telly.

As someone who got none of the tickets I applied for in the ballot, I was (with millions of other people) at the front of the queue for the first come, first served release of the remaining tickets.  I wasn't hopeful.  The very detailed email that the London Olympic Team sent me showed exactly what tickets remained, but experience of things like this has taught me to be dubious that the system would be able to cope with the demand well enough to enable me onto the site to buy the tickets at all.  Apart from anything else, the ticket window opened at 6am last Friday... at which point I was hoping to be asleep in my tent at Glastonbury.

Luckily, my friend John's dad stepped up to the plate and gamely took on the responsibility of trying to get us a few more tickets to add to the meagre haul we already have.   Loads of us applied for tickets in the ballot, of course, but our hit rate was so low that we've decided that we're going to pool our resources and try to share out what we've got as fairly as we can.

So, before heading down to Somerset, I handed over my London Olympic account and credit card details, and then mostly forgot all about it.  I woke up on Friday morning to the news that the whole thing had been very difficult and confusing and prone to crashing (surprise, surprise)... but that we very well might have got some tickets.  It's by no means entirely in the bag yet, but I eventually received a confirmation email and my account is showing an application for 6 tickets to two separate morning athletics sessions in the Olympic Stadium and six tickets to a qualifying round in the Women's hockey.

Result!  Roy did some pretty good work there as we slept off a skinful of cider in our tents.

Fingers crossed that we actually get allocated those tickets, eh?  I've no idea how that process is going to work, but although the tickets are sitting on my account, they haven't been billed to my credit card yet..... so we wait.

I get a feeling this saga has some distance left to run yet.....