CHINA:POLICE IN Beijing had great difficulty in controlling surging crowds of more than 50,000 people yesterday who were trying to get their hands on the last Olympic Games tickets, while a Hong Kong journalist trying to cover the melee was detained, writes Clifford Coonan.
With less than two weeks to go, the city is gripped by Olympic fever and a great sense of excitement about the games, which will mark China's emergence on the world stage. The frenzy over the final tranche of tickets is a sign of how high expectations are.
When it was announced that the tickets were going on sale, many of the buyers queued for two days despite the searing heat and pollution. Trouble began when some people tried to jump the queue and police had to react when a crowd ran at the ticket counter.
A quarter of a million tickets went on sale at 9am local time for events such as athletics, diving, and gymnastics. A total of 820,000 tickets were sold over the day.
So high was the demand that more than 10,000 people queued outside the Olympic Sports Centre, which is near the Bird's Nest Olympic Stadium, on Thursday, according to police.
By the time the tickets went on sale yesterday morning, the queue had stretched right around the nearby car park. The numbers queuing rose to almost 50,000 and police were forced to send in reinforcements. Scuffles broke out between police and people in the queue, who chanted insults.
Tickets for the games are in big demand. There is a flourishing black market with massive profits to be made, even though ticket touting has been outlawed. Police have arrested 60 touts over the past two months.
Altogether there were seven million tickets on sale for the games, with three-quarters of them going to China's vast domestic audience and the rest made available overseas through each country's National Olympic Committee.
Ticket sales will raise €90 million for the organising committee. Competition tickets are priced at between 30 yuan (€2.75) and 1,000 yuan (€94). Seats for the opening and closing ceremonies cost as much as 5,000 yuan and are sold out.
During yesterday's incident, Felix Wong of the South China Morning Post newspaper from Hong Kong was detained by police.
Beijing organisers have pledged to give reporters the same freedoms they enjoyed at previous Olympics.
After the disturbances, games organisers made "appropriate adjustments" to the sales schedule to cut waiting time.