Games on track for record crowds

The Paralympics in London in 2012 are set to be the best attended in the history of the event, organisers have claimed.

The London Organising Committee of the Olympic Games (LOCOG) have revealed that over 100,000 people have bought tickets in the first round of the sales, with initial estimates suggesting that 800,000 tickets have been sold to the public now that the random ballots for the oversubscribed events have finished.

Nine out of 10 of the 116,000 people who applied for 1,146,000 tickets are in line to get all or some of their ticket bids, London 2012 said.

Successful buyers will already have seen the payments being taken from their accounts from October 18 before they find out what tickets they have got.

Paul Deighton, CEO of LOCOG said: “We are on track to complete payments by the end of the month.”  

As Disability Now went to press, LOCOG’s commitment was that people would know what tickets they’d been allocated by mid-November.

“We were thrilled by the response to Paralympic Games tickets and since the application process closed our teams have been working hard to run the required ballots, ready to begin the process of taking payments and allocating tickets,” Deighton said.

Ballots were run for oversubscribed seats across 80 sport sessions and at 117 price categories. Total sales figures for the 2012 Paralympics jump to more than a million tickets when sales to international visitors, sponsors and other groups are included.

LOCOG want to raise between £20 million to £50 million from Paralympic tickets as part of its overall £500 million revenue target from all Olympic and Paralympic ticket sales.

The ticket sale which ran from September 9 to 26 had triggered “unprecedented interest” in the Paralympics a year out from the Games, they said.