Chaos in final rush for Beijing Olympic tickets

Friday 25 July 2008

BEIJING - Police were called in to control more than 50,000 people who queued for the last batch of Olympic tickets that went on sale here Friday amid chaotic scenes.

But 23-year-old Lei Peng, who had slept on the footpath for two nights and survived the jostling, walked away with a huge smile.

The engineering graduate from eastern China's Anhui province was close to the head of one massive queue and managed to score two seats to one of the hottest event of the Games - the final of the men's 110m hurdles.

Chinese hopes for an athletics gold medal rest on Olympic and world champion Liu Xiang who is defending his 110m hurdles title.

"It was hard but worth it," said Lei, who had been queuing since midday on Wednesday.

"I never came close to quitting, because I just kept focussed on those tickets."

The final 250,000 Olympic tickets for events in Beijing including athletics, diving, and gymnastics went on sale at 9:00am (0100 GMT).

Demand was so high that more than 10,000 people were in the line by Thursday at one of the main ticket selling centres near the Olympic Stadium and by early Friday huge reinforcements of police were moved in to maintain order as numbers ballooned to between 40,000 and 50,000.

Those figures were given by district police chief Xiong Xingguo and were for just the one location, with tickets also on sale outside other Olympic venues around Beijing and the other co-host cities.

In hot and dusty conditions, tempers occasionally frayed and jeering crowds pushed and jostled the police at one point, breaking through a crowd control barrier and lurching closer to the ticket counters.

Several people were dragged from the lines and taken away by police.

The line snaked several times around a large block of open land within sight of the main Olympic stadium.

"The police didn't have a clue how many people would come here and there was no organisation at all, it was chaos," said Wang Zhongliang, a delivery worker for UPS.

Police chief Xiong acknowledged it was "chaotic and difficult" to maintain order.

"Once the newspapers released the news about the ticket sale, too many people came at once so we had a security problem," he said.

Han Ruxiang, 76, had spent two nights sleeping on a bamboo mat so that he and his 67-year-old wife could go to see the finals of the diving competition.

"How can you be Chinese and not go to the Olympics when it is in China?" he said. "I am tired but so happy."

Unlike Han, others were not prepared to queue for themselves.

Ding Ye, 27, said she had got two tickets for the diving competition for her boss who runs a food supply company.

"He sent me in his place," she said.

There is also a flourishing market in selling tickets at a massive profit, even though scalping has been outlawed. Police have arrested 60 touts over the past two months, according to state media reports.

Outside Beijing, 570,000 tickets for football matches went on sale in football competition host cities Tianjin, Shanghai, Qinhuangdao and Shenyang.

Altogether around seven million tickets were up for sale for the Games, with around 75 per cent going to China's vast domestic audience, with the rest made available overseas through each country's National Olympic Committee.

Friday's round was the fourth and final round of ticket sales for the August 8-24 Games.