Beijing Olympics: (No) butts in the seats

Editor’s note: For the duration of the Olympics, we’ll be running a series of special reports on the TOC blog from Tom Pattison of Time Out Beijing. Here he describes the experience of watching the Opening Ceremonies on the streets of Beijing.

China’s Moon Festival falls on September 14 this year. The festival celebrates abundance, but also involves waste: people send Moon Cakes to friends, colleagues and customers but the cakes are rarely eaten – mainly as they taste like rubber filled with dried bat droppings. This year, however, Olympic tickets are being used to curry favour, and, like the cakes, not all of them are going to get used.

Hundreds of thousands of tickets have been given to officials, media, sponsors and VIPs who have no intention of getting up at the crack of dawn to travel the 100 miles to Tianjin to watch Burkina Faso and Latvia play women’s football. So, empty stadiums have become a topic of discussion once again, but it’s no great conspiracy: some games are just boring.

The difference this year is that the Chinese authorities have claimed this is the first Olympics in which all events have sold out. So even if you did want to see Burkina Faso perform their magic you can’t. The tickets given away to officials should have gone either to young locals, who could at least say they had been to a game; to overseas visitors, who are notably absent from Beijing; or to friends and families of athletes understandably enraged to hear they can’t get tickets to events when empty stands are plainly visible on TV.

It’s not just Chinese officials who are to blame. I observed 29 British tourists leave their tickets unused because they were too tired from climbing the Great Wall to go out that night. In the national houses and pavilions of the major countries, tickets are just left on tables for the taking. Sponsors have bundles of tickets which will remain unused when VIPs fail to show up. The only way to combat this is ticket scalpers – the more the merrier. In fact, several of them come from London’s East End: they are international brokers who follow the big games. We have one who comes into our local pub at 9pm every night with a bag full of tickets for the following day. Yet 110 scalpers were arrested in a crackdown over the weekend, meaning more empty seats and disappointed sports fans.

Still, despite the images of empty seats that the international media are enjoying so much, many events are packed to the rafters. Every event I have been to has started with all seats taken, although students had to be brought in towards the end to fill the spaces left by people who had become tired, hungry or bored – or had simply seen their heroes and then left. But the best events have a magic that’s hard to resist.

On Saturday night, the atmosphere at the packed beach volleyball stadium was fantastic. The weather was sunny, the commentators entertaining – and the troupes of bikini-clad cheerleaders did no harm either. But women’s beach volleyball is a game that people simply want to watch more than Latvian women’s football, so it was a great night – especially as someone had given me their spare tickets for free.

For more on Beijing and the 2008 Olympics, visit our sister site Time Out Beijing. Also, in preparation for the Olympics, China evicted 1 million people and London relocated several hundred. TOC's Jake Malooley wonders if the same thing could happen here if Chicago's bid for the 2016 Olympics is successful. And if it is, what will happen to our West Side landmarks? More on that in this article on Chicago's Washington Park.