What if they held an Olympics and nobody came? (2)

Of course, the wider world is going to be largely unaware that Beijing is comparatively deserted this month. The streets will seem busy enough anywhere there are TV cameras. And the occasional media story about the financial woes of hotels won't attract very much attention.

But what if the stadiums are half-empty?

The Olympic ticket sales have been one long string of cock-ups. The initial online 'lottery' was so oversubscribed that the website crashed within minutes. A fairly typical Chinese lack of foresight there - "Ooh, we didn't realise we'd need that much capacity on our servers!" When they did finally succeed in running it a few weeks later, there was still horrendous confusion. Many people didn't receive notification of the results. Many people, apparently, may have been awarded tickets, but never knew about it. This was allegedly because the original e-mail notifications somehow aroused the ire of most e-mail system spam filters. The problem was supposedly addressed. But many people I know claim they never heard anything. (Of course, they are mostly foreigners..... Am I being a paranoid conspiracy theorist again?)

The first round had been such a protracted mess that a lot of people didn't think there was any point in bothering with the second round lottery. I never even knew when it was taking place: it seemed to get a lot less publicity than the first round - but then, perhaps I just wasn't paying much attention, because I wasn't really all that interested.

And then for the final round of sales a couple of weeks ago, people were required to make purchases in person at one of a handful of sales booths outside the major venues. Huge crowds (and poor crowd control by an overwhelmed and irritable police force - not a good omen for the weeks ahead) produced some ugly scenes: the worst of it, perhaps, was the sometimes vicious manhandling of press who tried to film or photograph the scenes (Japanese YouTube has some of the best footage of this, here; plenty on regular YouTube too, but it seems to be mostly the same footage edited down, or with poorer picture quality - some interesting stuff here). South China Morning Post photographer Felix Wong accidentally kicked a policeman in the 'nads (as he was he was being jostled and thrown to the ground by 5 or 6 officers!): he was accused of assault, kept in custody for several hours, and was deported (or required to return to Hong Kong) a few days later; and, of course, his camera was temporarily confiscated and all his pictures deleted.

Despite all this, some tickets apparently remain unsold. Countless more are in a kind of limbo, nominally 'sold', but uncollected - it's still unclear what's going to happen to them.

The vast majority have been sold, though, and to local people. That's nice, isn't it? Well, yeah, maybe.....

I'm not convinced that many local people actually want to go. The handful of people you see interviewed on television, of course, all dutifully trot out the expected platitudes about how happy they are to be hosting the Games, and how excited they are to have tickets for something. However, just about everyone I know is massively bored by the whole affair; many, indeed, are irritated by it, or frankly hostile.

Morever, I'm quite sure that a very large number of those who originally bought tickets did so purely in the expectation of being able to sell them on at a fat profit. With the numbers of foreign tourists (and resident expats) in the city this month so low, that is going to be a lot harder than they fondly supposed, and I think they're going to struggle to shift their tickets at all, let alone at the crazy prices that some of them are asking. A couple of weeks ago, I was offered some tickets to the Men's 100m Final - for 5,000RMB each! I believe those tickets are still available. Yesterday, I had a chance to buy a VIP seat for another of the major athletics sessions for 3,000RMB - when they're still unsold in a week or two, I figure we might try to bargain the guy down.

The trouble is, the Chinese often have a rather stubborn streak in their entrepreneurism: sometimes, it seems, they'd rather take a hit financially than 'lose face' by selling something for less than they'd advertised it at (this is a particularly common vice in the property rental market, where some landlords will choose to leave an apartment vacant for months or years at a time rather than accept a lower rent offer).

And then, of course, just recently one of the main ticketing websites was exposed as a scam. Hmm - it's been operating all year, positioned at the top of Google search results, and flaunting official Olympic logos. I think I lay that one at the door of BOCOG and the IOC.

So, for a variety of reasons, a lot of us who'd quite like to have some tickets have not been able to get any. It is still impossible to obtain tickets at any kind of reasonable price. And yet a significant number of those who do have tickets are not that fussed about using them. There are going to be a lot of empty seats, I think - even in the Bird's Nest.

I'm still hopeful I'll be able to pick something up at the last minute. I figure that's going to be down to luck and 'the grapevine', though - chance encounters in bars and restaurants. I rather doubt if the piao fanzi (street touts, or 'scalpers', as the Americans say) will be allowed to operate in their usual way (although a couple of journo friends of mine were suggesting the other day that they think perhaps they will; they might just have to be a little more discreet, and hang out a little further away from the venues). Oh well, we shall see.