Yep, it's obviously another way to generate revenue. I probably wouldn't have gone to one unless I liked the headliner for the attached concert. With Nelly being on for around 45mins, I didn't feel ripped off (tho, I was actually expecting the worst like 20m).
We sat in the $50 seats (midrange pricing I think) but as gglave mentions, there are $22 dollar seats too (which I think comprises the upper bowl). The ceremony occurs in the stadium but in a closed off end zone section of it.
BTW, it's also worth noting that at the competition itself (well, at least for the long track event we went to), they did have a ceremony at the end with the medalists where they stood on the podium and were given flowers.

For the medal ceremony themselves, they had clips of the events and of the individual medalist's performances which was kind of cool but as I previously mentioned, it got repetitive going thru 5 or 6 in a row. Plus they video conferenced in the ceremonies in Whistler. (Was kind of odd clapping for the medalists that weren't actually there and wasn't sure if we should stand for their national anthem.) Might have been more interesting if they broke each ceremony up with entertainment in between but it'd probably have been a logistical nightmare. Kind of neat that a few of the athletes waded into the seats afterwards to greet family & friends.

Olympic Ticket Scam
 

Well, personally I think the whole Vancouver 2010 Games Ticket Request was a scam. I put in for the following tickets;

CL001 - City Locals OEP 1
(ZO001 - Opening Ceremony)
(IH016 - Ice Hockey)
(SB004 - Snowboard)
(CU013 - Curling)
(VC007 - Vancouver Victory Ceremony)
(IH036 - Ice Hockey)

C0024 - City OEP 24
(SB006 - Snowboard)
(IH050 - Ice Hockey)
(ZC001 - Closing Ceremony)

ZO001 - Opening Ceremony
IH047 - Ice Hockey
IH048 - Ice Hockey
IH049 - Ice Hockey
IH050 - Ice Hockey
ZC001 - Closing Ceremony

Out of all of these tickets that I requested, I got ABSOLUTELY NONE OF THEM. That's right, not a single ticket.

I guess you had to live in Vancouver to actually get picked to get any tickets. Oh well. With all the other scams that Vancouver has been doing to it's residents, I can easily see how and why this scam so easily went through.

I will not be buying any post sales tickets at all. There's no way I would buy any tickets above the original face value. I might offer about $2-3 bucks per ticket, for Men's Gold Medal Hockey.

It's funny now how so many tickets that were reserved are coming available for sale. I guess they royally screwed up with the Ticket Request scam. They obviously over anticipated WAY too much. Then the economy busted.

Also, you have to pay for medal ceremonies every night? Wow! I remember at Calgary's 1988 Olympics it was completely free of charge. Well, good for you again Vancouver. Slip another one past all the suckers coming to your town!

As for Visa, I cancelled mine. I'll never use them again. Official credit card for the Olympics? If you're so narrow minded that you ensure you negate half of the population from even being able to purchase from your product, then you deserve what you get.

Good for Vancouver, your public is now being dumped with an estimated 2.5 billion debt (will end up being way under estimated). That doesn't even take into consideration how much more it will cost to host the Paralympic Games right afterward.

On the bright side, this will probably burst the Vancouver housing price bubble. Especially when the real estate taxes jump 20-30% to pay all this off. Also, the HST will end up being broader covering many more items than what the GST + PST used to cover.

Time to get out of Vancouver = Right now!

Yep, that was the case--Salt Lake's medals plaza was comparable in size to Whistler's. I saw Train at one of the Salt Lake medals ceremonies, and will be at the Whistler medals ceremony on Friday night, so I'm looking forward to comparing the production (although Salt Lake had only one ceremony per night as opposed to a simulcast, so there's a big difference right there).

As for selling medal ceremony tickets, IIRC the Salt Lake ceremonies were completely free and were only available as part of a multi-day Experience Package. One originality point therefore goes to VANOC for turning the ceremonies into a huge revenue generator.

Calgary '88 did the same thing - the park downtown is still here, where a lot of the medals where handed out. Although it was a free event in '88 - not ticketed like Vancouver.

$50 is the highest price for the victory ceremonies - not mid-range. Most tickets are $22 (I have tickets for three ceremony events all at the $22 range, and my tixs are in the 200 level. I guess the $50 seats must be near the front of the stage or closer to the front of the 200 level sections.

boo-hoo.

So you requested for the most popular events of the entire Olympics (All mens hockey semi-final & medal games) and are shocked you didn't get those tickets? That sure does sound like a scam. :rolleyes:

140,000 requests where made for the gold medal hockey game in phase one. tens of thousands of people must have been scammed by that one.

Y'now, I am fine with debate, but I am getting p1ssed off at this ongoing repeating of this $2.5B number with no cites, no evidence, no nothing.

...and don't go pointing to the Canada Line or the Sea to Sky or the curling venue or any other capital project. The Canada Line needed doing - All nations that believe in public transit in turn believe in rapid transit to their airports and suburbs. The deathtrap highway to Squamish and Whistler needed to be fixed up - My wife's cousins drive that all the time as they head home. Why don't the people in Squamish have the right to a safe highway? They pay taxes. Ditto the curling rink which will turn into a community centre that my kids will use for the next fifteen years, whereupon other kids will use it.

For those interested, here's an interesting 3-month old article about Olympic ticketing.

http://www.tdn.com/news/article_de4f...1797db466.html

Basically, despite the noble goals, the Olympic movement is partially corrupt. Not surprising for a world organization sloshing around with money, perks and privileges. As a long time Olympic atendee (Albertville, Atlanta, Beijing) I always wondered about the CoSport ticketing monopoly. From this article, I think you can draw a reasonable conclusion as to how they got and maintain their contract.

My mistake. I think we were in 200 level seating too but just off centre. There was a bunch of floor seats too which I thought would have been more expensive but I just checked pricing and I guess not.

Not trying to respond to you directly Calgary Jay but just quoting to keep some continuity around the topic of a "ticket scam"...

This is kind of 3rd hand info and complete hearsay but my wife's friend's fiancee said they discovered a flaw in the waiting room queuing system during the 2nd round(?) of sales (I think the one where they had to delay it a few days). Don't know if this is true but they ended up with a quite a few tickets apparently.

I'm not sure if I read that article or some similar one. I've got to agree that if you take a step back, the Olympics do appear to be a big machine with backroom/under-the-table deals, access though connections, etc... which is kind of ok I suppose in the private business would but starts getting a questionable when big chunks of tax dollars are spent with limited accountability and transparency.

From a pragmatic perspective, the Olympics are here and I'm going to enjoy them. No point in sticking my head in the sand.

What a game tonight. I think I want to head up on Wed for a few days. Now gotta find tickets. :p

Great Olympic experience!
 

I only got 2 tickets in the initial lottery but got all the rest of the tickets I wanted, including the opening ceremony in the June sales opportunity. No scam. The medal ceremonies were a good value at $22 including a concert but I would have liked people to have the chance to see medal presentations for free. The Olympic experience was totally amazing and VANOC did a great job. While I had my snowboardcross ticket cancelled due to unsafe conditions I decided to head to the departure hub anyways and one of the staffers there offered to put me on a bus to Whistler for free instead and I bought cheaper tickets for cross-country skiing and will have the money refunded from the other tickets. Those good news stories don't make the news. Transit was also amazing moving thousands of people with trains running as close as 30 seconds apart!! Greyhound to Whistler had tonnes of buses running and all was on time. Well done Vancouver/Whistler and VANOC :-:

My Vancouver 2010 experience was quite good, albeit too brief.

I flew in to YVR on 22 Feb and flew out 23 Feb. I stayed at the lovely Fairmont in YVR airport. In between I saw 3 hockey games:

Women's semifinal - USA vs Sweden
Women's playoff - Swiss vs Russia
Men's qualification - Swiss vs Belarus

I would rather have had more time and therefore could have seen a greater variety of events. I would have loved to see speed skating (which I only get to watch every 4 years). And it arguably would have been fun to go to Whistler or even Cyprus for a day. Nonetheless, seeing a bunch of good-quality hockey games with no emotional investment required was a fun experience. I actually had no idea of who I was seeing until I arrived at the stadium and saw people waving flags. Then it became a game of identifying which flag was which. :)

Security at the arenas was a bit much. There were only a few gates where people could enter. To get to them, it was necessary to walk all the way around the stadium, across a few streets, up a bridge, down a bridge ... To their credit though, even though airport-style security was in place (x-ray machine + metal detector) there were quite a few stations open. At Canada Hockey Place (GM Place) they had 18 out of 26 stations open. At the much smaller Thunderbird Arena at UBC, there were 10 of 14 stations operating. My time in line was relatively short - perhaps 10 minutes. I spent longer walking around the arena to get to the security line up.

Once inside all was well. Food / beer etc were standard arena prices. I took my Nikon D200 with an 18-200 lens and there was absolutely no issue. Only once was I told by an usher not to use flash but other than that I was free to take as many pics as I wanted to. Lots of people had cameras and a few had some rather serious lenses (300mm + in both Nikon and Canon varieties). Within reason, people were allowed to wander around to take pics which I thought was nice. ^

Exiting the arenas was a pain though as again, only a few doors were used. Funnelling 20,000 people through 3 or 4 doors was dumb IMHO. It greatly lengthened the time necessary to empty the arena and needlessly created bottlenecks of people. To make matters worse, the road beside the area was closed to traffic but they wouldn't let us walk on it - we had to stick to the (fenced-off) sidewalk. I'm not sure how this enhanced security in any way. :td:

In downtown YVR, during the day things were generally calm. Robson St was open to cars in the day and it was very quiet. In late afternoon though the barriers went up and Robson was transformed into a pedestrian zone / street party area. The Vancouver Art Gallery was clearly at the centre of the action. This is where you can find the infamous zip line (yes - the lineup really is that long!) and other Olympic displays. The lineup to get into The Bay was impressively long as were several other lines for various pavilions and displays.

Down by the waterfront, the new Media Centre is a nice-looking building. And beside, behind that hideous chain link fence stands the Flame. The cutouts and Plexiglass do make it easy to get a decent shot but I personally believe that the Flame is a symbol of the Games and as such, should stand freely. There's a platform where apparently you can get am unobstructed view of the Flame, but the lineup to get to the platform looked too long for my tastes so I didn't bother.

Public transit for ticket holders is free. I was able to ride the Canada Line to / from YVR airport without any difficulty. Similarly I took the Millennium Line to the arena and a bus to and from Thunderbird Arena at no added cost. No one every checked my tickets on the transit system, but you are only supposed to use the free transit if you hold a ticket to an event that day.

The new Canada Line is quite nice. It does stop at a lot of places, but I was able to do YVR to downtown Vancouver (Waterfront station) in 30 min. At the Bridgeport station lots of people get on / off so the train does get crowded quickly, but it's nothing abnormal if you're a regular transit rider in a big city (like I am).

I regret that I didn't have time to experience downtown at night, nor to go see a few of the pavilions. I would have liked to visit Sochi house to learn a bit more about the next Olympic city. But on the whole, I'm glad I did the Olympics while they were here in my own backyard so to speak. Seeing everything on TV is great but being there is something I've wanted to do for a long time.

There's not much time left, but if you have time to go to the Olympics I encourage you to do so!

I wonder if the low number of entrances and exits was due to the relative closeness of when the next game would start, and the desire to separate the incoming and outgoing spectators? They aren't used to 20,000 leaving and another 20,000 entering within a 2 hour span.

RCyyz, I was at the Swiss vs Belarus game yesterday too. Going to the Women's Bronze tomorrow (late) morning.

I found security to be quick, but the several block detour we faced entering GM Place and BC Place (for the victory celebrations) was completely unnecessary.

The Swiss / Belarus game was the first game of the day, at noon, and they obviously were not cleaning the staduim very well between games. Floors were filthy and not swept or cleaned; quite disgusting.