Government Seizes 8,815 Tickets for Own Use at London 2012

It has been revealed that the Department for Culture, store Media and Sport (DCMS) has acquired 8, anabolics 815 tickets for Government use at the Olympic Games, which includes 3,000 tickets available for purchase by civil servants who have worked on the Games.

A demand for tickets have been at a premium with many UK residents angered by missing out on a Olympics which will be right on their doorstep. No doubt the revealing of this ticket allocation will fuel the public discontent.

In total there are about 14,000 tickets set aside for Government officials, including 200 of the best tickets available to each of the London boroughs.

However the details of the DCMS allocation has highlighted that the Government has the best seats at the most highly prized events, limiting the numbers that are then made available for public sale.

The tickets purchased by the DCMS are £750,000 ($1.2 million) in total, made up of 212 opening ceremony tickets for £194,525 ($311,530), 142 closing ceremony tickets for £71,490 ($114,493), 256 athletics tickets for £33,805 ($54,139), 410 beach volleyball tickets for £26,600 ($42,606), 224 track cycling tickets and 350 diving tickets for £29,530 ($47,314).

The DCMS ordered 212 tickets for the opening ceremony, which has been quarantined for VIPs only, at a cost to taxpayers of £194,525.

Just over 40 of the opening ceremony tickets ordered were for the most expensive seats of £2012.12 ($3,224) each.

A DCMS spokesman said: “We are determined to use this unique opportunity [of hosting the Oympic and Paralympic Games] to maximise the economic benefits for the country. The Government has purchased 8,815 tickets for the Games – around 0.1 per cent of the 8.8 million tickets available.These will be used to invite and accompany a number of international and domestic political and business leaders, as well as guests with a close connection to the Games and its legacy.”

The DCMS has also paid out £71,490 ($114,546) for 142 tickets for the closing ceremony, 256 tickets to athletics, 410 tickets to the beach volleyball, 224 for track cycling and 378 to swimming. The diving finals, likely to feature Tom Daley, was a popular Government choice, with 350 tickets reserved for that event.

The sport in most demand by the Government was the mountain biking with 1,020 tickets, followed by football with 699 tickets. The least popular sports were trampoline gymnastics (24 tickets), race walking (36), synchronised swimming (36) and Greco-Roman wrestling (33).

The allocation of such high numbers of Government tickets to smaller venues such as the Aquatics Centre and the Velodrome has put increased pressure on Locog to reveal the exact numbers of tickets available to the public in those venues.

There are fears that the numbers of tickets at each of the price points in the public allocation to see Sir Chris Hoy, or Rebecca Adlington is in the hundreds, not the thousands.

This comes as two-thirds of the 1.9 million ticket applicants failed to receive any Olympic tickets in the public ballot.

Total ticket revenue for the organisers is expected to come in at £500 million ($801m).