Following on from last week’s post and as Los Angeles starts it’s four year focused preparation for 2028 I wanted to delve a little further into the games themselves and the idea of actually watching them live,
It’s definitely on my bucket list to watch the Olympics live but is that really going to be possible in my lifetime?
I decided to do a bit of research into this long held dream………………
All the photos on this post are taken from my 2023 collection when we travelled around the USA passing through nineteen states!
If we begin back in London in 2012 when 97 per cent of all tickets available were sold.
There were 8.8million tickets available of which 6.6 million were offered to the general public. 5.94 million of those tickets were priced at £100 or less of which 3.92 million were £50 or less and 2.5 million were £20 or less. Accounting for inflation, in 2024 this equates to £144, £72 and £29.
Four years later, in Brazil, approximately 3.8million tickets were offered at a cost of 70 Brazilian reals which is about £17 or less, with the cheapest ticket priced at 40 Brazilian reals (about £13). That was 1.3 million more tickets at this lower price point compared to London. With inflation, this would be £23 and £17.
Fast forward to Covid affected Tokyo. Prior to the games being postponed by a year, half of all tickets were priced at £60 or less, when converted from the yen with the cheapest general tickets priced at £19. I couldn’t actually find out how many tickets or what percentage were offered at this price though.
In Paris one million tickets were released at £20, that’s only 10 percent of the overall tickets being within a price range that locals could probably afford.
But what do you actually get to see for these low end prices?
There is no doubt that these tickets will be in the least desirable areas — predominantly the highest and furthest away from the action and will not include medal events.
Tickets for the opening ceremony in London were priced between £20.12 and £2,012 and the closing ceremony. between £20.12 to £1,500.
The most expensive tickets were for swimming, gymnastics and athletics.
In Tokyo tickets for the opening and closing ceremony cost locals more than £1,500 each, with athletics being the most expensive sport.
In Paris more tickets than ever were sold for the Olympics with the opening ceremony tickets ranging from £75 to £2300. The £75 tickets not surprisingly sold out within an hour and imagine spending money on tickets and having to watch half of it on a screen as the rest took place live but further up the river!
The closing ceremony ranged between £40 and £1360.
For those wanting to watch a qualifying match in the tennis in Paris you would have been looking at around £260 but this was the cheapest seat. Think about an auditorium in a theatre and all those seats far, far away from the stage, sometimes slightly behind a pillar or watching at an angle and this is the type of seat that £260 would have bought you.
Cheaper tickets were available for courts where lower-profile matches were being played.
The diving qualifications (not the finals) were a similar price.
The coveted ticket for the mens’ 100m final cost between £70 and £830 depending again upon your seating.
Of all the events at the Paris Olympics there were only thirteen in which you could see medals won in which tickets would cost less than £170 at their maximum.
How do families get to support their familial contestants?
The quick answer is they don’t unless they save up lots of money!
By the time you have paid for flights, accommodation and tickets in order to be there to see your family member in action you have possibly blown the family holiday budget for the next 2-3 years.
For me this really brings into question why the competitors cannot apply for up to two tickets each at a heavily discounted rate for one event they are competing in?
In this era of mega technology it would surely be fairly simple to make those tickets non transferable so the competitors couldn’t apply, buy and then attempt to resell them for an increased price.
When you have trained for four years to compete for your country surely it’s not a lot to ask that you can have familial support? After all, these are the same family members who have got up early day in, day out, driven their family member to events, forsaken other days out and holidays away for that one person to fulfil their dream. They have been there throughout. They may well be working class folk who have just supported that family member’s dream of representing their country. Why shouldn’t they be there in their finest hour?
And what about local people attending?
I’ve blown my chance of seeing the Olympics in my home country but what about those living in Los Angeles in 2028 or Brisbane in 2032?
Interestingly history has shown that hosting the Olympics tends to result in severe economic deficiencies for cities. Unless a city already has the existing infrastructure to support the excess crowds pouring in, not hosting the Olympics can often be the better option.
Given this fact the local people actually get very little if any benefit from living in an Olympic hosting city. There wasn’t even a new stadium built in Paris this year.
In fact, as was fairly well publicised this year, many Parisians moved out of the city for the fortnight of the games. They didn’t want the inconvenience of over 11,000 competitors plus their associated support teams descending upon the city, blocking roads, filling up underground trains and just generally upsetting “normal life”!
If they were lucky enough to have gained tickets through working for a company involved in sponsoring the games these tickets were often given away to family members happy to temporarily fly into Paris for the events for which tickets were intended or alternatively those ex gratia tickets were sold on!
Olympic hosting cities spend a phenomenal amount of money on hosting the Olympics. The London Olympics cost a total of £8.77 billion – three times the original budget of £2.4 billion! However the UK economy saw a trade and industry boost in excess of £14 billion following the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games, beating the four year target of £11 billion in half the time. I wonder how many people in London or even the UK knew that or felt like they saw the benefit?
Surely local people in these hosting nations deserve something in return?
I think free tickets for key events, not sitting behind a pillar tickets, should be offered in a lottery.
Everybody who is willing to organise transport to get there and accommodation if necessary should get to buy a lottery ticket at a reasonable price to win two tickets. On winning, those tickets would become non transferrable, so they couldn’t be sold on and the winner would have the opportunity to pick two tickets from those made available for the key events. They might want to see the Opening Ceremony, then again they might want to be there to see the fastest man in the world cross the line.
Admittedly the chances of winning would be very low but every week people buy lottery tickets throughout the world for that one chance to strike it rich.
This would firstly generate funds that could be used to enhance the Olympic budget and also give ordinary people the chance to see the Olympics live.
America is the top gambling country in the world so come on USA let ordinary folk spend a few dollars for a chance at some decent tickets for the next Olympics!
What do you think?
Should the Olympic Games only be open to those who have lots of money to see the key events?
Would you buy a lottery ticket to win two tickets to a key event?
Is is unfair that competitors family cannot be there to support them unless they have lots of money for tickets?
Let me know your thoughts…………..
Why not read my previous post about the Paris Olympics?: https://amidlifeadventure.org/2024/08/16/paris-2024-olympics-what-did-you-think/
A Midlife Adventure 