London mayor acknowledged public concern and vowed to pressure committee to release a detailed breakdown
London mayor Boris Johnson has vowed to put pressure on London 2012 organisers to be more transparent over how tickets have been allocated, particularly for blue riband events.
The London Organising Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games (Locog) was criticised last week by a London Assembly committee for refusing to release a detailed breakdown of which tickets had been sold at each price point.
About 75% of the total of 8.8m tickets have been made available for sale to the British public, but for the most high-profile events in the main stadium and the velodrome the proportion will be much lower. For the 100m final, about 29,000 tickets are expected to be sold to the British public of the 80,000 capacity, which will be reduced to 74,000 at games-time owing to the erection of big screens at either end of the stadium.
"I fully share the desire of the assembly for transparency and we will be raising this at the Olympic board," said Johnson.
"What Locog say is that they don't want to release the details until the issuing of the tickets is complete. I can see a certain logic in that. But I certainly feel Londoners and the whole country want to see fairness and transparency," he added.
A Locog spokeswoman said: "We are committed to providing a full breakdown of ticket sales, and believe the best time to do this is once we have completed the final sales process ? we still have nearly 4m Olympic and Paralympic tickets to sell and our priority is to get those into the hands of sports fans. We are firmly committed to providing 75% of the total number of Olympic tickets to the British public, and if we can deliver more than this, we will."
Locog argues that the overall numbers available remain fluid, pointing to a recent reduction in capacity for the equestrian cross country in Greenwich park from 75,000 to 50,000 and an increase in the capacity on Box Hill for the cycling road race to 15,000.
Dee Doocey, the Liberal Democrat London Assembly Olympic spokesperson, said she was "delighted" that Johnson backed its calls. She added, however, that if the information was not released until after all tickets were sold it would be too late to intervene if the distribution was unfair.
"We need to know now how many tickets have been sold for each event, and at what price. If this information is not provided until all the tickets are sold it will be too late to do anything about it," she said.
"Locog excuses for not publishing information are indefensible from an organisation that only exists because of a huge investment of public money."
The final batch of 1.3m tickets across all sports will go on sale in April. About 20,000 prospective purchasers who missed out last June in the second phase of sales, despite believing they had purchased tickets will have first refusal for 24 hours.
The remaining million people who applied in the first round ballot and failed to secure a ticket will then be given five days to apply, although Locog has yet to decide when tickets will be released over that time. The process will then be opened to all comers, but only tickets to the men's and women's football are likely to remain by that stage.
ends
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2012/feb/22/boris-johnson-olympics-ticket-allocation
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