Winter Olympics tickets are hard to get hands on

By Chester Allen | The Olympian • Published October 14, 2008

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The 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics are still 486 days away, but you've got to move now to MAYBE get tickets to your favorite event.

The process looks dicey and expensive — and no one answers the doggone telephone.

There is one place to get tickets — CoSport.com — and you’ve got until Nov. 7 to put in a request for tickets. Each person is limited to 48 ticket requests.

You have to give CoSport your credit card number, but you won’t know until December whether you’ve got tickets to a favorite event.

I’ve tried to call the CoSport toll-free number for more details — 1-877-457-4647 — but humans don’t answer the phone when I call.

I’ve called quite a few times.

A recording invites me to send an e-mail for more information, but why have a telephone information number that doesn’t offer information?

As I understand it, requesting tickets — and submitting your credit card information — puts you in a pool for tickets to your chosen event. CoSport’s Web site says that all requests will be equally weighed in a “Ticket Allocation Process.”

What, I wonder, is this “Ticket Allocation Process?”

Do they put all the requests in a hat and pull them out one by one? Is it some complicated computer program? Do they make paper airplanes out of each request and award tickets to those that glide the farthest?

I don’t know, as the Web site doesn’t say — and no one answers the doggone telephone.

All of this feels weird, especially when you look at the ticket prices.

Seats to the hockey finals game — sure to be a hot event — are $678 and $930.

The ladies figure skating freestyle program tickets sell for $370 or $566 — and you can’t pick your exact seat.

The gala skating exhibition — the program where top skaters show off after winning medals — is $650 or $426 a seat.

The female snowboarding half-pipe competition — the event I’d like to see with my daughter — is $202 or $88.

Is an $88 ticket to the snowboarding halfpipe a standing-room-only spot 300 yards from the half-pipe? Are there seats? Does the ticket include the cost of riding the ski lift to the halfpipe?

I don’t know, because the Web site doesn’t say — and no one answers the doggone telephone.

Now, you can wait until February — or maybe March — and buy tickets through a first-come, first-served process. But will there be any tickets left to buy? CoSport’s website says the ticket pool includes these countries:

Australia, Austria, Bulgaria, Sweden, The United States and The European Union.

In other words, billions of people.

I’ve got so many questions. Yeah, you guessed it: No one answers the doggone telephone.

I do know that tickets won’t actually be printed until two months before the opening ceremony — the website told me that.

I love the Winter Olympics — well, except for the figure skating — but I wonder whether I’ll be able to see at least one event that is less than a day’s drive from my home.

I wish that someone would answer that doggone telephone at CoSport.

I suspect it would cost me a minimum — when you include travel costs, hotel, meals and other expenses — of $2,000 to attend three or four days of the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics.

I could jet off to Hawaii and surf a few days — and steal a few days of summer in the middle of winter — for a lot less. The folks in Oahu and Maui answer the telephone.

Chester Allen can be reached at 360-754-4226 or callen@theolympian.com.