Vancouver hoping to avoid empty seats at venues

Tickets for events at the Vancouver Games are still available but organisers believe they will avoid a past Olympic problem - empty seats left by people or sponsors who decided not use the tickets they had.

"The first step is to sell every ticket... and we believe we will achieve that," Dave Cobb, executive vice president of the Vancouver Organising Committee (VANOC), said yesterday.

Venues at the 2008 Beijing Summer Games were blighted by empty seats caused by corporate sponsors not using allocated tickets. Organisers have moved to avoid a repeat this time.

VANOC was the first organising committee to set up its own system to allow tickets to be resold at market rates by people who no longer needed or could not use their seats.

"We hope that is shifting tickets into people's hands that will use them, whereas in previous Games maybe they wouldn't (have been resold)," Cobb said.

More than 1,000 tickets are being resold daily via VANOC's www.Vancouver2010.com website, while Olympic sponsors who get special access to tickets are being pressured to make available or donate those they do not plan to use.

"We are confident it was everything we can do, but at the end of the day we can't force somebody to go sit in a seat," Cobb said.

Organisers have been trying to keep details of last night's opening ceremony a secret, but dress rehearsals open to invited members of the public have led to some Internet leaks.

After urging people not to spoil the surprise, VANOC officials hinted the opening ceremony and the Olympics as a whole will try to show a side of Canadians the rest of the world does not know or confuses with being an American.

"We're your neighbour, and often people think we are you. People hear us talking, or see our athletes, or see our performers and think we're you," VANOC chief executive John Furlong told a reporter from the United States.

The VANOC news conference was their last before the start of the Games and gave organisers time to reflect on the years of preparation since Vancouver was awarded the event in 2003.

"I hope the Games will be a very human experience, and people who visited here will go home thinking we did a good job and we're a pretty good group of people and they had a good time," added Cobb.