Transport troubles kept the Vancouver Olympics from being a true sellout.
Of the 1.55 million tickets available for the Vancouver Games, just under 1.5 million really sold. The numbers were revealed at a meeting in Krasnaya Polyana, Russia, between Vancouver 2010 arrangers and the team for the next Winter Games in Sochi.
Caley Denton, vice-president of ticketing for Vancouver's organizing committee, said the vast majority of unsold tickets were for mountain events where sales were restricted by an overloaded transportation network.
"We only sold tickets to people within Whistler because our transportation was full," Denton said in a phone interview from Russia.
Ticket sales for Vancouver were ahead of the 2006 Turin Games, where about 80 per cent of tickets were sold. Arrangers of the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, meanwhile, said they had the first sellout in the history of the Summer Games.
How much Vancouver organizers made from ticket sales won't be revealed until their final financial report is released, likely this fall.
But the domino effect of transportation on ticketing is one of several lessons Vancouver organizers are hoping to impart to Sochi organizers. There are 45 staffers from the Vancouver organizing committee currently meeting in Krasnaya Polyana, the mountain resort town that is to Sochi as Whistler, B.C., was to Vancouver.
Sochi organizers are building much of their Olympic infrastructure from scratch, while in many cases Vancouver was able to use existing venues.
But there are other similarities, which make the meetings in Russia this week quite relevant, said Dennis Kim, director of licensing and merchandising for the Vancouver team.
"The similarity is the vastness of the country geographically," said Kim. "So there are similarities in that sense: how do you get merchandise and marketing initiatives across broadly when you are challenged by geography?"
In Vancouver's case, they signed a deal with HBC to be the official retail supplier, which allowed Games merchandise to be sold at hundreds of retail outlets across the country.
But that came with challenges of its own.
In her presentation to Sochi organizers, Vancouver's Andrea Shaw noted they didn't realize signing such a deal might create a conflict with another sponsor, VISA.
Shaw said HBC presumed that they'd be able to make the bags for Olympics merchandise but Vancouver staff later learned that right always fell to VISA, a sponsor that's part of the International Olympic Committee's TOP program.
"That was probably one of the biggest challenges, us engaging and understanding the TOP contracts," said Shaw, vice-president of sponsorship sales and marketing.
As part of their meetings, Vancouver also released its 2010 Legacies report Tuesday, the fourth in a series of studies they commissioned on what's been left behind by the Winter Games.
The report illustrates a tension in hosting an Olympics, as it includes projects like highway upgrades and rapid transit expansion which some argue would have been done without the Games and therefore shouldn't factor into their overall cost or benefit.
"It's clear that as of spring 2010, the legacies of the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Games are still in their infancy. They exist and have a defined path, but it will take years before many of them are fully realized," reads the report.
It concludes: "It's the intangibles that seem to be dominant now - impressions, memories, patriotic feelings, a national sense of pride. They, too, are valid legacies of the Games."
They're also the hardest thing for Vancouver organizers to teach Sochi, other than to think about finding a red mitten campaign of their own.
Over 3.5 million pairs of mittens sold during the Games, pouring hundreds of thousands of dollars into athlete development.
"You certainly can't plan for the emotion," said Kim.
"We certainly got lucky."
A trend that's emerging at the meetings in Russia is taking the role of the organizing committee global.
Internet sales are a way to put Olympic merchandise in the hands of fans around the globe, noted Kim.
"The expectation for anybody is that if I'm a consumer here in Canada I'd like to get Sochi products because I'm a Sochi fan or maybe I'm a Russian immigrant living now in Canada and really want to get the Russian team gear," said Kim.
"Global sales are timely for Sochi, for other (organizing committees) and certainly the IOC to ensure that global market is achievable through online sales which is the most effective way."
The Internet should also allow great control over ticket sales, suggested Denton. Right now, organizing committees can only sell in the host countries but global sales should become the norm.
"It is going to be easier for the average person to purchase tickets," said Denton.
