Olympic nonsense

If they are trying to dampen my enthusiasm for the Olympic Games by making all sorts of ridiculous processes and procedures...they are succeeding.

Today I got this email:

Priority presale for Olympic Games tickets

We would like to invite you to take advantage of an exclusive presale for London 2012 Olympic Games tickets from 11am on Sunday 13 May until 11pm on Thursday 17 May 2012.

You are one of the many Olympic sport fans who have applied for tickets previously and were unsuccessful. To recognise your support for the London 2012 Games, you now have a chance to purchase up to four tickets for one session of your choice on a first come, first served basis.

There is availability in most Olympic sports - however, not all sports will be available on day one. To make the process as smooth as possible for everyone who wants to purchase we will release a new set of sports every day. Read a full list of what tickets are on sale and when. We suggest you look at this schedule carefully, and decide what tickets you want.

We anticipate demand will be high when ticket sales open. There may be occasions when you will be held in a queue while we are processing transactions for the customers ahead of you. If this happens please be patient, don't refresh your browser or move away from that page. You may also receive a message saying that no tickets can be found. This is because the tickets in that price category and/or session have sold out. If this occurs, please select an alternative price/session and try again.

Once you have purchased tickets in the presale, you will not be eligible to purchase further tickets until the general sales of any remaining Paralympic Games tickets on 21 May 2012 and Olympic Games tickets on 23 May 2012.

In short, they recognise I was shafted during the original ticket lottery, and so to make it up they are giving me a chance to buy the crap that was left over before it goes on sale to the general public.  Fair enough, except you only get to buy tickets to one event, and the different events are being released over 4 days, and there's no guarantee you'll be able to get tickets to the event you want! So game theory dictates you should apply each day for one event, even if the event you really want is another day, because odds are you won't get tickets to any of them.  (Remember, over a million people did not get any tickets in the lottery!)

So in other words, it's an even worse way of allocating tickets than the lottery was!

I can't imagine what is wrong with the people organising this, other than they are getting their own tickets out of the 45% reserved for corporate sponsors, and so don't give a damn about the 55% being sold to the public. :-(