LONDON – The second round of ticket sales for the 2012 London Olympics drew fresh public criticism within hours of its launch on Friday for the slowness of the website.
Thousands of people across Britain rose at dawn to get online for an early start in bidding, and discovered the site was working — but very sluggishly.
Olympic organizers urged ticket hopefuls to be patient — and to not hit the refresh button too often.
"This frantic Friday has created the biggest rush ever in U.K. history," said Edward Parkinson, the director of Viagogo, an online ticket marketplace. "It's even bigger than Michael Jackson's comeback tour."
The latest chapter in a ticketing mess that has drawn criticism nationwide because of its complexity and perceived lack of fairness, comes after two-thirds of ticket seekers failed to earn any in a first round that ended in April.
The question is sensitive in this time of economic austerity, as critics have charged that millions have been spent to build stadiums and otherwise finance the games — only for the public to be shortchanged when it comes to actually seeing them.
Sensitive to the possible public relations debacle, London organizers likened Friday's problems — particularly the slow response on the site — to a train station that needed to modify traffic in order to keep the whole system running. Sales will continue for 10 days, with more planned for later.
London 2012 was flooded with 22 million requests in the first round for the 6.6 million tickets available. The 1.2 million people who failed to get tickets in the first round received priority on Friday.
Their enthusiam and the feverish demand for tickets quashed fears that sales wouldn't go well and early impressions that British fans weren't excited about their own Olympics.
A barrage of complaints followed the first round of sales. Thousands of people took part in the complicated process of blindly submitting requests for tickets in a lottery, together with the payments for those events.
Critics who feared the empty stands seen at the Beijing Games need not have worried. As the tickets were awarded, it became clear that many buyers had been disappointed. Many fans submitted requests for thousands of pounds (dollars) worth of tickets, only to end up empty-handed.
So few were successful that London's Evening Standard did a front-page story featuring a couple which snagged tickets to the premier event — the men's 100-meter dash. Winners of tickets to other events described it as akin to Christmas. Britain's powerful newspapers offered bar charts on who was awarded tickets — together with grumbling about corporate sponsors given substantial allocations.
"This is a once-in-a-generation event," said Viagogo's Parkinson, who added that ticketing was bound to be complicated. "The reality is that there are more people that want to get tickets to these events than are available."
But what made many people angry was the fact that the system was open to manipulation. Some fans put in for thousands of pounds (dollars) worth of tickets — far more than they could use — assuming that the more they would ask for, the better chance they would have of getting some.
Ticket hopeful Tori Hunt, 29, applied for 600 pounds ($960) worth of tickets — only to get nothing. She intended to try Friday morning, but upon hearing about issues with the website, thought she'd wait, thinking that the tickets would be spaced out over the 10-day window for sales. But by mid-afternoon, only boxing, wrestling, weightlifting, volleyball and football were left.
"It's quite dismaying that some people got so many," she said. "Given that it's a public event with public money, they should have put a cap on the number of tickets."
Even some of the nation's top athletes missed out. Three-time Olympic cycling champion Bradley Wiggins, who hopes to defend his team pursuit title, was one of the 1.2 million people who missed out on tickets in the first ballot. He called the allocation "a bit of a shambles."
"I'd love to have my family there. I grew up in London and would love to have my mum and everyone there watching me but, you know, that's the way it is I suppose, you just get on with it," he told the BBC. "It's a shame but there's nothing you can do about it."
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