Byline: New York Times
ATLANTA With mail-order sales ending last Friday, Atlanta Olympic officials are expecting a decrease in the number of complaints about the complicated ticket ordering process for the Atlanta Games next summer.
Since June, some 337,000 Americans have requested tickets to the Olympic Games, but only 249,000 of them will actually receive tickets and most will receive only about half of what they requested.
The Olympic committee said tickets remain for half the events. The committee has been besieged with complaints about the mail-order portion of the sales. About the only way to get tickets now is to wait for telephone sales to begin in February and settle for the leftovers.
``We're disgusted,'' said Rick Hutto of Macon, Ga., who requested dozens of tickets and received four. ``My wife and I each ordered more than $2,000 worth of tickets on separate credit cards. We got four tickets for the cheapest seats in one session of one sport.''
Hutto is among at least 37,000 Americans who lost out in the computerized lottery last fall to determine who would receive tickets for the events in highest demand, like the opening and closing ceremonies, women's gymnastics and men's basketball.
After the computer awarded 2.7 million tickets to the high-demand sports, the Atlanta Olympic committee released a list of 17 sports for which it said tickets were still available. But the list of remaining sports turned out to be inaccurate. About 30 sessions in high-demand sports included on the list were actually sold out.
The fault, the committee said, was a computer model that predicted a month in advance which sports and which sessions in each sport would sell out. But the model was not sophisticated enough to take into account tickets sold to people who listed second and third choices on their order forms.
``We made a mistake in not publishing the fact that those 30 sessions were oversubscribed,'' Scott Anderson, the committee's managing director for games services, said in a recent interview. He said the committee immediately sent letters to customers informing them of the error.
Susan Stewart of Atlanta, who ordered tickets to beach volleyball, track and tennis, lost out on all of her ticket requests in the lottery. ``By the time we looked at what was really available,'' she said, ``it seemed like the only tickets we could get were for things like underwater basket weaving.''
In addition to the opening and closing ceremonies, sold-out sports include swimming and diving, archery, badminton, men's basketball, boxing, cycling, fencing, gymnastics (except for ticketed practice sessions) and rhythmic gymnastics, men's team handball, judo, modern pentathlon, table tennis, tennis, volleyball, weight lifting and wrestling.
Some other sports are virtually sold out. For example, a few tickets remain for a single session of track and field on the morning of Aug. 1, but all other track and field tickets are gone. Only a few tickets remain for women's team handball, rowing, shooting and softball.
Substantial numbers of tickets remain for baseball, field hockey and soccer. None of the soccer games will be played in Atlanta. The men's soccer final in Athens, Ga., is sold out, but many tickets remain for preliminary games in Washington, Orlando, Birmingham and Miami.
Ticket sales policies have not yet been announced for yachting, which will take place off Savannah, Ga.
