Olympic Primer - Part Two

Tickets

The great winter showcase of amateur sport charges fans prices no amateur could ever afford to pay. Of course, some sports are more in demand than others. Hockey tickets will be by far the most coveted, but the problem is that no one knows for sure which teams will be playing in a particular semifinal or final game. Should Team Canada bow out before the medal round, look for thousands of tickets to suddenly become available.

There are a few other sports which can garner huge prices for tickets that are legally scalped on the authorized VANOC site. Figure skating is probably second, after hockey, in popularity among winter olympic sports in this part of the world.

VANOC is the company created to put on these games, and are essentially folks appointed by the powers that be to try to make the various levels of government look good. In return, the provincial government will make sure it appears that the Olympics don't bankrupt our children's future by saddling us with decades of debt.

They do this in a variety of ways, like being petty about sponsorship and Olympic logo copyright. For example, their legal team went after (unsuccessfully) a Vancouver Greek restaurant with "Olympic" in its name--just because the restaurant had been operating with the name for 40+ years didn't mean that they should be allowed to keep it.

Then there's the use of our tax dollars to indirectly prop up the games. Sure, billions of tax dollars are going directly into the game venues, security, highway and other upgrades, but there's more than that. Three provincial crown monopolies: ICBC (insurance), BC Hydro, and BC Lotto have bought 1.4 million dollars worth of Olympic tickets. BC Hydro is spending over a quarter million dollars to book a luxury suite for all 33 hockey games in GM Place. (Which will be named "Canada Hockey Place" during the run of the games.)

Funny how there's money for this, while millions have been cut from health care and education this year.

VANOC has set up a website for ticket resales. It's legal to scalp tickets in BC, but when you buy your tickets, there's a bit of legalese you agree to that states that no one but VANOC can resell them for more than face value. Want tickets to the gold medal hockey game? At one point last week (when the article I read was written) the cheapest pair of tickets for the men's gold medal final available were listed at $4444.00. There were a pair of better tickets on sale for $9998.00.

I'm sure if you want biathalon (ski, shoot, ski some more, shoot some more event) tickets they're cheaper, but when you figure in inflated hotel costs, there is no way regular folks can afford to see these games live.