It’s all an Olympic waste of time

I was in two minds about buying my Olympics tickets for some time. This was a chance to see some great riding. But champing at the bit, I was not.

As one may expect, tickets were not cheap and of course I wanted good value for money. Seeing good horse-and-rider combinations strut their stuff is great, but it may be better value-for-money to invest in training with one of those riders. However, regarding tickets, as you may well know, one could not simply buy them. It was a sort of lottery in which one had to register, ask for whatever tickets one wanted and hand over intimate financial/personal details, all in order to wait with bated breath at the prospect of being allocated the ‘requested’ tickets.

I can easily add to this the necessity of having to use a VISA card to pay for such tickets. It looks like a revolting sponsorship deal. This does not reconcile with the otherwise rather sensible explanation currently doing the rounds. This is that due to a unique rule governing the use of VISA accounts, the tickets bought with them cannot be sold on to ticket touts and thus the price not be inflated or used as a vehicle for insalubrious activity. Of course it is perfectly possible that such a sensible rule and such a nauseating sponsorship deal are not mutually exclusive. If it were a combination of the two, I think it would reflect well on the organisers.

Commentators have been rather negative about the Olympics up to now, moaning that “It’ll be crap because it is in London and not anywhere else”, which is itself a relief. Perhaps the sort of furtive stubbornness we have seen from the Olympic organisers is the result of such attacks. The side-effects of having people tough enough to organise the largest sporting event in the world are a revolting logo, a nauseating sponsorship deal and a peculiar ticketing system. It all leaves me with a feeling that it is not quite cricket.