Vancouver Olympics tickets--any suggestions?

[JohnnyLib2]

I've bombed out so far and may be banished from the family. Leads? Clues?

[Suich]

1. It doesn't look real good...

Seattle Times staff reporter

After a rocky start, the final substantial U.S. sale of tickets to the 2010 Vancouver Winter Games left some fans leaping for joy, and others skulking away Thursday.

The sale began late, nearly 90 minutes after the promised 11 a.m. PDT start time, and the Web site of CoSport, the exclusive U.S. ticketing agency, appeared balky at best, completely overloaded at worst.

But when the sale of 40,000 tickets began, the server responded, at least for the most part, and tickets were sold with blinding speed. Fans snapped up tickets for high-profile events such as the men's downhill (at $135 and $202), the Opening Ceremony ($900 to $1,300), and qualifying rounds of many other sports.

Prices paid for less-glamorous events indicates the extreme demand. Some fans snapped up tickets to the qualifying round of the team pursuit in long-track speedskating, for example, for $249 each. Others paid nearly $550 per seat for ice dancing.

Within an hour, all that remained available on the CoSport Web site were tickets to the Closing Ceremony, at $930 each, and preliminary men's and women's hockey games.

The sale was the last large quantity of tickets expected to be available to customers in the United States, where competition has been keen due to a very small overall allotment from the Vancouver Organizing Committee. Fewer than 100,000 tickets from the 1.6 million total were made available for sale to the U.S. public.

Many fans complained that they had carved out an hour of their day to pursue tickets, only to see the goal posts moved, once more, by ticket seller CoSport of New Jersey. Others said they had tickets in their checkout cart, only to have a computer glitch during credit-card processing bounce them back to square one, at which time the tickets they were after were all gone.

For the most part, though, the Web sale seemed a vast improvement over earlier CoSport efforts, with many fans able to purchase tickets and view a "live" inventory of what was available.

[JohnnyLib2]

2. Thanks

That sheds light on the whole thing.
sigh.