High hopes, and prices, as Olympic tickets arrive

Tickets for London 2012 go on sale from Tuesday, but British taxpayers still don't know what the games will cost them, writes MARK HENNESSY, London Editor

THE OLYMPICS are coming to London, and prices are rising. A three-bedroomed house in Southwark, on the south bank of the Thames near London Bridge, is being offered to visitors for £7,000 (€8,200) a week, and a tiny one-bedroomed flat in Greenwich will cost nearly £1,700 (€2,000) for each week of the games. A five-bedroomed house in Blackheath, a stone’s throw from the entrance to Greenwich Park, which will be home to the equestrian events, is available for nearly £11,000 (€12,900) a week. It is described by its letting agent as perfect for corporate hospitality.

Most of the interest in such properties is coming from international Olympic committees: the Swiss, for example, say they will need 60 rooms just for their officials. Media organisations needing to find bunks for thousands of staff are looking in the less salubrious Wapping and Limehouse areas.

Up to 350,000 regular visitors, once they run out of offers to stay with friends and relatives, may have to head towards letting companies such as Crashpadder, which is offering spare rooms for £200 (€235) or more a week.

So far the planning for the games, under Sebastian Coe, has not involved the kinds of blunder that overshadowed preparations for the Olympics in Athens and Sydney, though the UK’s National Audit Office (NAO) warned last month that the final bill for taxpayers is “inherently uncertain”. The £269 million (€315 million) London Aquatics Centre, which has already run over budget, is due to be finished by July; the athletes’ village must be ready to be handed over to the Olympic organisers by January 2012. This is a timetable that, the audit office cautioned, is becoming tight.

The aquatics centre should have been ready by April, but builders ran into difficulties with the design and fabrication of the roofing steel, “which proved more complex and protracted than envisaged”, according to the NAO, and “affected the rest of the project”.

Nevertheless, confidence is still high for the first Olympics to be held in London since the austere postwar games of 1948. Eighty per cent of the work is now done, and five of the 24 projects necessary to host the games are complete, many with the help of Irish construction companies.

Security, predictably, is running over budget, at about £757 million (€885 million) in the latest estimates, partly because the costs were not accounted for separately in earlier versions of the budget put forward by Coe’s team.

Speaking this week Coe said he was confident that the 8.8 million tickets that will go on sale from March 15th will sell out, even though the Beijing Olympics failed its less glamorous events three years ago. Events will be priced according to demand: a highlight such as the 100m men’s final will cost £495 (€580) for the best seats in the stadium (other than the premier places that will be kept for sponsors of the games).

Three-quarters of Olympic tickets will be released next week. Nine out of ten will be priced at £100 (€117) or less, two-thirds will be on offer for £50 or less, and 2.5 million tickets – many, it must be said, for minor sports found only on the outer fringes of satellite-TV land – can be bought for just £20 or less.

Public interest, even in these difficult times, does exist. Nearly 250,000 people have signed up to fill the 70,000 volunteer jobs on offer, with interviews due to take place all over the UK in May.

Not everything, however, is sweetness and light. The British Olympic Association (BOA) now believes it was short-changed in a deal it did with London 2012 to sell its marketing rights for a guaranteed £30 million (€35 million) spread over seven years. The London 2012 organisation, which is set to raise nearly £700 million (€820 million) in sponsorship from multinationals, believes the deal, which also offered the BOA a 20 per cent share of any surplus, is fair, but it disagrees over whether the cost of the loss-making Paralympic Games should be deducted first.

Meanwhile, Iran is spoiling for a fight over the much-disliked London 2012 logo, which shows four shapes arranged around each other in varying colours. Tehran argues that the shapes can spell out “Zion” and, demanding changes, claims that the logo is “a very vicious act and against the Olympics’ moral slogans”.

David Cameron, the prime minister, told the Jewish News, “It’s completely paranoid. If the Iranians don’t want to come, don’t come: we won’t miss you.”

Tony Blair once described the 2012 logo as “brilliant, or awful”, with the distinct implication that he thought it was the latter. Produced four years ago at a cost of £400,000, the logo met with little public enthusiasm. Some critics compared it to a swastika “or a collection of beer mats”, though calls for a redesign petered out quickly.

While the BOA fights for more money other national Olympic councils are making plans for their athletes’ last-minute preparations. The Irish will be heading to St Mary’s University College in Twickenham, an institution with long-established ties to Ireland. The Chinese, who topped the gold-medal leader board in 2008, with 51, will be based in Leeds as they seek to get used to the British weather.

Join the queue . . .

Olympic tickets will go on sale from this coming Tuesday. You’ll have a chance to buy them until midnight on April 26th. Olympic organisers warn that “tickets will not be allocated on a first-come, first-served basis”, so there is no advantage in being first in line.

Potential buyers – all EU citizens are eligible, among others – should choose a price category rather than a particular seat in a venue, though it is recommended that they should give a price range that they are willing to pay, which will “increase your chances of being allocated tickets”.

Olympic organisers repeatedly warn against bogus sites, directing people to tickets.london2012.com. Touts will face fines of between £5,000 and £20,000 if they are caught selling Olympic tickets.

Tickets for the Paralympic Games will be sold in the same way from September.