We thought that these sorts of thing happened in India only.... London 2012 - 'Olympic family' got 97 per cent of tickets for event *Newly released figures show just how difficult it was for fans to buy tickets for the London Olympics. *Eurosport –
- [image: he Olympic rings are seen during a pyrotechnics display at the pre-show before the opening ceremony of the London 2012 Games (Reuters)] <http://uk.eurosport.yahoo.com/photos/masterpiece-ceremony-photo-024220184.html> Eurosport - The Olympic rings are seen during a pyrotechnics display at the pre-show before the opening ceremony of the London 2012 Games (Reuters) For one tennis match there were just 73 tickets made available to the public, while for the final night of cycling at the Velodrome a paltry 322 were available at the cheapest price of £50. For the tennis at Wimbledon, a first round clash between Novak Djokovic and Fabio Fognini saw only three per cent of the tickets made available to the public, with the rest going to the 'Olympic family' of VIPs, media and sponsors. What's more, only two of the tickets were at the low level price of £40, three were sold at £55, with the rest in the higher price bands. For cycling sessions only 1,957 out of the 4,331 seats went on sale to the public and most of them cost over £150 with some as high as £325. The figures appear to break a promise made by organisers to have an equal number of tickets available in each price band. Tickets for modern pentathlon, sailing, tennis and triathlon all had most of their tickets sold at the higher end of the price bracket. LOCOG boasted before the Games that they would provide 2.5 million tickets at £20 or less but over half of these came in football. For cycling, just 2,160 tickets went on sale at the £20 mark during the entire Olympics. Liberal Democrat London Assembly spokesperson, Stephen Knight accused LOCOG of operating "a veil of secrecy over the sale of tickets". "Getting this information out of LOCOG has been like pulling teeth. We've been asking for it for a long time," he told Sky Sports. "There were two promises made. There was a promise that about 25 per cent of the tickets would be at £20 or less, and although that's true across the pitch, that is certainly not true at the prime sessions. "The second commitment we were given is that broadly the same proportion of tickets at each price band would be available at each session. That clearly hasn't happened. "The promise was not kept and we have LOCOG to hold to account. "They should have been upfront. They have operated a veil of secrecy over the sale of tickets." -- With best wishes S Chander
