It's not just footballers who should learn an Olympic lesson

We've all seen the pictures of the Chancellor being booed heartily by the crowd in the Olympic Stadium when he took part in a medal ceremony. The reaction of most people seemed to be amusement and it is, in fairness, always slightly funny to see a politician getting the bird when they stick their head above the parapet.

But the Tories should be careful to heed what was a pretty emphatic warning. The sound did not come across as a few malcontents - it seemed as though the entire stadium, 82,000 people, were joining in lustily. That is a significant and representative sample of the electorate they have to face at the next general election, letting a deeply unpopular Chancellor know what they think of him. Not that I believe it was an entirely party political thing - witness the reception Cameron and Boris Johnson, Tories both, received at the parade of Olympians outside Buckingham Palace on Monday 10th.

Rather, this was, I believe, a firm statement of the distaste people feel for a man who's making savage cuts to budgets across the public sector, across services that affect everybody, and ignoring the howls of protest that he's doing so too quickly and too deeply. The reshuffle (or rearrangement of the Titanic's deck chairs) they just undertook left Osborne bizarrely unaffected. He seems absolutely bomb-proof, of all the possible candidates Cameron could have moved. I don't know if this represents blind faith in their dogmatic approach to spending policy, blind faith in Osborne himself or simple, stubborn stupidity.

Whichever it is, the Tories may find out to their cost just how heartfelt those boos were, how indicative of the strength of feeling against the Chancellor, if they do not heed them.

A once-in-a-lifetime privilege

Last Saturday has already gone down in the annals of British sporting history, with gold medals all day, but particularly the three in the Olympic stadium in one dazzling 45-minute spell in the evening.

This was, for me, the day that I got to use the only tickets I'd been able to secure, for a morning's handball in the Copper Box. Taking the advice, or rather the dire warnings, on travel and getting to the venue early, I was up at six to meet my mate and head up to the park. The travel was, in fact, a doddle, as was getting through security and into the park. Friendly and efficient welcome, everybody chipper and a state of happy expectation. A slight hiccup when one of the many volunteers greeting crowds from vantage points on the top of step-ladder high chairs, on spotting a Belgian flag, yelled, "Good morning, Germany!" through her loudspeaker. Never mind - in keeping with the general atmosphere of goodwill, they took it in good heart.

Excitement grew pretty quickly after getting our bearings; I even posed for a photograph - willingly - in front of the Olympic Stadium, with a union flag. Anybody who knows me will realise the double-rarity value of such a thing. So, we headed to the Copper Box in plenty of time for the couple of games we were to see.

We saw a valiant GB side, put together from nothing in the past six years to compete at these Games, get handed their usual thrashing, and then saw South Korea v Serbia. A couple of hours very well spent in a cracking venue, with a loud, positive crowd really getting into both games. Handball is a game I've always thought would go down well in Britain if it were played to a decent standard, and it's been one of the success stories of the Games.

The rest of the day, though, was genuinely one of the great sporting experiences of my life. My mate and I spent the rest of the day and all evening in the Park, sitting watching British successes on the two huge screens they've put up there. All around were noises of cheering from the huge main stadium, from the hockey stadium, the basketball arena and around the screens themselves. As darkness fell and the big stadium filled up, partly emptying the park in the process, those without tickets to go in gathered in front of those screens and saw those three golds in quick succession. For all of them, but for Mo Farah in particular, there was jubilation. I saw, and felt, national pride without it spilling over into jingoism, and no trouble. It was an entirely positive experience. We left just as Jessica Ennis was receiving her gold medal, hearing the 80,000-plus in the stadium singing the anthem as we made our way out.

However much I was enjoying the Games already, nothing had compared to that Saturday. I have, needless to say, sat up late into each night since, trying until the early hours to secure tickets for anything else, anything, anywhere, without success. With so little time left I've basically given up trying now, and must instead look forward with huge anticipation to the closing ceremony, which I'm lucky enough to have a ticket for through my girlfriend.

With just four days to go as I type, it's been a huge success so far. They've ballsed up the ticketing, as I predicted in a much earlier post months ago, and they've ballsed up the mascots - in the Megastore in the Park, ranks of forlorn Wenlocks and Mandevilles sat unsold, while this new lion thingy which has appeared lately was flying off the shelves - but they've got the Games themselves right. Throw in a British public which, both in the excellent volunteers and the vast, positive, celebratory crowds, have switched off our innate reserve and pessimism for a couple of weeks, and you've got an absolute bloody marvel.

Paralympics may suffer because of the Olympic ticketing farce

This is the last time I'll complain about the ticketing arrangements for the Olympics because I desperately want to write positive stuff about the Games on here in future. But this needs to be said.

Having, as you may have read, secured the grand total of one pair of tickets for an as yet undisclosed first round fixture in the handball, I'm now getting a string of e-mails from the Games organisers about various other stuff (travel, Olympic news etc).

The latest was the announcement of the ticket sales for the Paralympic Games, which almost immediately follow the Olympics. I haven't even bothered to read it. I'm not going to bother applying for tickets for the Paralympics. This is not because I have no interest in Paralympic sport - quite the opposite. It's because I've been so badly put off by the Olympic ticketing arrangements that I have absolutely no intention of repeating the experience.

Once bitten, twice shy, as they say. Given the total shambles which has preceded this, I wonder how many other potential spectators at the Paralympics will be deterred in similar fashion. I'm simply not prepared to apply for loads of tickets, get my hopes up, have money taken for I-don't-know-what, months in advance, only to then be disappointed again.

I still sincerely hope that the Paralympics are as well supported by spectators as the Olympics. Given the passion and love for sport in this country it certainly would be under normal circumstances, I'm sure. But the arrogant dismissal of any dissent about the way things have been handled may just stick in people's throats enough to screw things up, leaving empty seats at venues where athletes who deserve better are doing their thing.

This would be a great shame, but the fact is, the Paralympics could end up paying the price for the Olympic ticketing organisers' hubris, money-grabbing and deafness to legitimate complaints.

Olympic ticketing disgrace reaches new depths

Well, with the revelation of what I've been 'lucky' enough to be allocated in the great Olympic ticket Fucky Dip, they've somehow served to make me even less happy with the way things have been done. Having applied for tickets for a wide range of sports, across a wide range of prices, across a load of different dates, I've been given precisely one pair of tickets for an early round of the handball. Nothing else. For the privilege of posting me these tickets, which they won't do until next summer but for which they've already taken the money, I've paid an additional £6. That's about as outrageous a piece of profiteering as you could expect to see anywhere.

But worse - in the same email, there was the reminder that there are 'still tickets available in football, wrestling, handball, volleyball and hockey', and that I can apply for tickets in those sports in the 'second chance' application process in the next few weeks. Well I'm intrigued that there are still tickets left in those five disciplines, given that I applied for tickets in four of them. There is no indication given as to whether the tickets which will be available soon are unallocated tickets from the first ballot, which I simply didn't get, or are new tickets held back from the first lot and only being made available now. Either way, it feels like they're gleefully rubbing my nose in it. My mind again goes back to the insistence of the organising committee that this is a process about which the public know more than any previously. What utter bollocks.

My partner has been similarly 'lucky' to have got two tickets for the closing ceremony. A fortunate woman, yes - plenty of people would be happy to get them, and indeed she is. But she's received absolutely none of the tickets she applied for in the actual events which make up the bloody show that the closing ceremony is closing. So we'll get to watch a bloody great parade of athletes, none of whom she'd have seen in the previous two weeks doing what they came to Britain to do, and possibly some highlights of the whole jamboree on the big screen, just, again, to rub her nose in what she's missed.

So, having completely disenfranchised everybody without a Visa card, anybody without access to the internet and anybody on a low income who would not have money in the bank in advance for these things, they're now going about disenchanting the very people with the actual damn tickets. What a terrific way to make the ticket holders feel good about the whole thing - handing out tickets scattergun to people in some bonkers lottery which leaves football fans watching dressage and archery fans watching wrestling, because that's how the draw came out for them. People will, as is often the way, have to sort this out for themselves, and get tickets for sports they actually want to see, through the ticket exchange website which will no doubt be set up by LOCOG for the ticket holders to deal with a mess which is not of their own making.

What an utter, utter fucking shambles. Expect to hear more declarations of how happy the organisers are with how it's going in the media any day now.

Olympic ticketing farce is a peculiarly British affair

Don't get me wrong - I was absolutely ecstatic when London won the bid for the Games, and I'm entirely pro having them in the city. I even tried bloody hard to work for LOCOG, and almost succeeded. So none of what will follow here means I'm changing my mind about having the Games here - it's an all-round good thing. It'll bring regeneration, tourism, optimism, all the things we all know about, to London. The facilities will be done on time, built well, and they'll be well organised, with an army of volunteers giving up their time to make it happen.

None of that, though, can excuse the shambles that has been the sales of tickets, and the typically British, nothing's wrong, ignore the stench of the dog farting in the room response. I think, in most cases, when you buy a ticket for any event, you want to know only three things: when it is, where your seat is, how much it is. Unless you happen to have been lucky and got a ticket for a final or something, none of those three things are known to anybody at the moment. People left with hundreds, or thousands of pounds taken from their accounts with absolutely no idea what for.

Can you imagine this at Top Shop? Or Sainsbury's? "Here's your bill, we'll let you know if you've got the men's trousers you wanted or a bikini in the next three weeks." You'd tell them to fuck off. Most irritating, though, is the typically British response, which has arrogantly insisted that this is the best way, that in fact it's the best Olympic ticketing process there's ever been. Paul Deighton, LOCOG's Chief Exec, even said, “I don’t think there has been a ticketing exercise where potential buyers have had so much understanding of the process.” Well you could have fooled me, Paul. I have not the faintest idea how much money you're going to take from me yet as, not knowing weeks in advance how much money I'd have in my bank account on whichever random day it was eventually going to be emptied, I had to give them my credit card details. As I don't yet have the statement for the period covered by whenever they take the money, I not only don't know what I've got tickets for, if anything, but nor do I know how much they'll cost.

What I do know is that some people already seem to know what they've got, as there are stories circulating in the media of people who have applied only for men's 100m final tickets, and got them. So how all this constitutes the most transparent, most understandable, fairest way of distributing the tickets is utterly beyond me.

The arrogance, the insistence that all's well, the complete disregard for the legitimate complaints of people who can see the inadequacies of the system, are typical of the response which always seems to come from big business in cases like this. They know they'll sell the seats, and they certainly know they'll fill the corporate seats they've kept back in such numbers, so they simply don't give a shit. That's why they're able to be so complacent, so indifferent to the complaints.

So I'm still looking forward to the Games. I'm still hoping to have got tickets for some good stuff. But there had to be something to make the Olympic nay-sayers feel like they were right all along, and in this case, it's the ticketing.