The rich people's games
By Sean Healy
SYDNEY — Any hopes that the 2000 Olympics would live up to their billing as the "people's games" were dashed on October 26 when SOCOG, the body responsible for running the games, revealed how few tickets were really available to the general public.
In spite of an expensive marketing campaign, in which former Australian cricket captain Mark Taylor claimed, "Every Australian has an equal chance of getting the tickets they want", the public had access to as few as 4% of tickets for some popular events.
For the opening ceremony, for example, only 20.5% of places were available to the public. Only 14.8% of seats at the closing ceremony were publicly available.
The best A-grade places were in even shorter public supply: only 10% at the athletics final, 3% at the artistic gymnastics finals and a mere 16 seats (0.2%) at the diving final. The rest were reserved for Olympic officials, VIPs, the media, national teams, corporate sponsors and premium ticket holders.
SOCOG's documents, released under freedom of information laws, also disclosed that, if you are wealthy enough, tickets can be purchased even for officially "sold-out" events. Three thousand tickets for the closing ceremony were available to premium customers, for example, even though it was marked as "sold-out" in the public booklet for the second round of ticket sales.
These ticket packages are aimed at the very wealthy. The members of the exclusive Tattersalls Club, for instance, who include Kerry Packer, Chief Justice Jim Spigelman and Australian Olympic Committee president John Coates, were offered up to $500,000 worth of premium tickets to events such as the swimming finals.
The total premium program is worth $100 million to SOCOG, and up to 324,000 of the best seats in the house are up for grabs. Some 200,000 of the packages include accommodation at top hotels and wining and dining at Sydney's best restaurants.
Since the revelations, officials and politicians have scurried for cover, like cockroaches when the lights are turned on. Prime Minister John Howard said the public had been "misled" — even though he has a personal appointee on the SOCOG board, John Valder. NSW Premier Bob Carr, trying to build up a safe distance from a board packed with Labor's mates, said it was "wrong to give people an illusion of easier access to the tickets".
Even individual board members were ducking. Valder claimed he was a "mushroom" — kept in the dark and fed bullshit. He hasn't offered to return the $50,000 a year he gets for turning up to half a dozen meetings, however.
The chairperson of the ticketing committee, former ALP headkicker Graham Richardson, also tried to claim such status: "We're all in that dark room".
Corporate Olympics sponsors, who receive exclusive ticket and hospitality packages to the best events, have also protested. Ansett and Telstra both complained about the availability of premium packages — because the packages undermine their prestige as sponsors.
Ansett's Olympics general manager, Glenn Robinson, asked, "Why would we be happy with SOCOG selling premium packages to our competitors or undermining our potential leverage in the marketplace?".
Fronting a media conference, Coates, Richardson, Olympics minister Michael Knight and International Olympics Committee (IOC) member Kevan Gosper all refused to apologise for deceiving the public (although Knight did so several days later).
"I don't think we have been dishonest", Richardson said before claiming, "We should also take a share of responsibility in what has thus far been the most successful ticket selling of any Olympics ever".
Board members have known about the elite ticket packages for 18 months; it was a major part of SOCOG's budget. The failure to reveal this fact at the time, before the marketing campaign began, was described by some board members as an "oversight". Knight, however, admitted that the decision to suppress was made because the information "would compromise the commercial realities of selling tickets".
To buy off rising anger, the SOCOG board announced that an additional 520,000 tickets will now be released for public sale. Under orders from the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, refunds will also be offered to those who didn't get their first or second ticket choices. SOCOG also promised that 52% of total tickets would be available to the public.
However, according to SOCOG chief executive Sandy Hollway, "It won't be 52% ceremony by ceremony and sport by sport. The pie chart is a macro chart." And the 52% doesn't match anyone's calculations, which show the real proportion is closer to 35%. So there are plenty of public tickets to the 8am heats of the canoeing and Graeco-Roman wrestling; just none to the finals of the popular sports.
The revelations should come as little surprise, given the Olympics' proneness to tales of corruption and sleaze. Salt Lake City's bid for the Winter Olympics, for instance, was mired in scandal, including claims that Australian IOC member Phil Coles received tens of thousands of dollars' worth of free hospitality and gifts.
The Olympics, like most elite sports, becomes less about athleticism and more about profiteering and unadulterated greed with every passing year. This fiasco is but one more proof.
SOCOG's commercial and marketing manager, Paul Reading, the man responsible for administering the premium packages program, was frank: "I am the ugly face of capitalism. I'm not employed to give advice on equity; this is about making money."