go to the winter olympics

Had an amazing time! Here are some pictures:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/goldberg/sets/72157623305777511/

Got the final piece of the travel plans into place: train tickets. Leaving the morning of Fri 12 Feb and coming back late Wed 17 Feb.

Now I just need to find tickets to more events :)

Tickets went on sale today, and the website was utterly, completely inaccessible. It took 30 minutes to sign in, bring up an event page, and put some tickets into my cart. By then, the entire thing was sold out.

I got so many ODB errors I’m guessing the site was built by Wu Tang Clan.

What a disappointment. There’s one more lottery later in the month, that’s the last chance for face-value tickets. After that it’s a scalper’s market

On Feb 5, more tickets will go on sale (available to USA residents only). They’re first-come-first-serve (as opposed to the first round which was a lottery). I hope cosport is prepared to get their servers slammed.

If you live in the USA, there was only one place to get tickets to the Olympics. They recently released some stats on their ticket lottery:

• Over 48,000 tickets were available
• 82% of all events were over-subscribed (i.e. more people requested tickets than there were tickets available)
• 14,000 orders were placed, for a total of 166,800 tickets
• Only 55% of the orders received tickets (only 25% of the requested tickets were fulfilled)
• 40% of orders came from Washington state
• The 3 most requested sports were: ice hockey, figure skating, and snowboarding

There was a lottery for tickets and I only got tickets for 1 of the 3 events I requested. It’s biathlon (the one event I wanted to see the most) but I already have a 5 days lodging booked in Vancouver.

Apparently there’s a 2nd lottery round so I hope to get some more of the tickets then.

Tickets to the 2010 Winter Olympics just went on sale a few hours ago:

http://www.cosport.com/

I bought tickets for Snowboarding, Biathlon, and Short-track Speed Skating. The latter sport I didn’t even know about until today. It’s like roller derby on ice, with a relay-race component built in. I was surprised at how expensive the tickets for more popular sports are. $200 for figure skating? $400 for ice hockey?! Supply and demand, I guess.

There are (relatively) cheap hostel rooms in Vancouver’s 3 HI hostels. Hotels were asking around $500, and cabins up in Whistler were more like $1000. That’s like an order of magnitude more than the hostel.

The last piece of the trifecta will be train tickets up to Vancouver. They’re not on sale until next year.

I’m so pumped!!! Especially for biathlon, which has always been a “something that is only done professionally in Europe and I only get to see on Youtube” sport.

http://www.wabiathlon.org/pdfs/2010sched.pdf

I can’t wait to see the biathlon and snowboarding! I can’t believe it’s going to be in our backyard. Like Expo ‘86 times 1,000,000!!!

I think I’m going to bike up to Vancouver and hitchhike up to the Whistler events, anyone want to join me?