If they fought to get tickets why are there so many empty seats? | News

Lack of interest: half-empty stands at the Olympic Green Archery Field this week
Andrew Gilligan
12.08.08

Until now we've all been reporting that the Chinese are thrilled at their Olympics. From the snapshot conversations I've had with ordinary people, that's certainly been my view. But now, as better evidence starts to arrive, the doubts are creeping in. Where are all the spectators?

We were told by the Games organisers that apart from a few football matches outside Beijing, every one of the 6.8 million Olympic seats was sold, and had been for weeks. We saw pictures of people fighting for tickets. This would not, it seemed, be the normal Olympic story where the early rounds and the more obscure sports struggle to attract interest.

But this week, even in sports with a serious chance of glory for the nation, there have been hundreds, even thousands, of empty seats.

At the women's archery, China won silver - but the stands at the Olympic Green Archery Field were only just over half full.

Admitting today that he was "concerned about not filling the seats," Wang Wei, executive vice-president of the Beijing Games organising committee, confessed that Olympic volunteers had been pressed into service to fill up the empty spaces and "encourage atmosphere".

And he offered what you might call the British Rail excuse. "I think it is due to a number of factors, [such as] the weather conditions - hot, humid and then rain," said Mr Wang. "

The seats are sold out. Some people have tickets for the whole day but only attend the morning, afternoon or evening session." Sponsors and athletes' families, too, are blamed for not using their allocations.

Over the weekend the rain was indeed heavy but Beijingers must be acclimatised to heat and humidity. And as for the sponsors - mostly Western corporations - there cannot be that many sponsors' guests in a country so far away from where the main corporate headquarters are.

Mr Wang did not mention this, but it seems likely that the heavy hand of choreography and security that's settled on Beijing has done far more to put off would-be spectators than any thunderstorm.

And there's one other explanation that went unmentioned: that in Beijing, the age-old Olympic discipline of spin is alive and kicking.

It emerged yesterday that part of Friday's opening ceremony, the bit where 29 giant "footprints of fire" advanced towards the Bird's Nest, was faked. For that section of the programme, TV viewers, and those of us watching on big screens inside the stadium, saw pre-recorded, digitally created fireworks, not real ones.

That worldwide TV audience was said, on the night, to have numbered four billion. This actually turns out to have been the total possible reach of all the stations carrying the broadcast. The actual audience was a rather lower one billion, five million of whom were in Britain.

In a Games where, as we've been reporting, the entire host city has been turned into a kind of Potemkin Olympic village for the duration, with significant parts of its real personality suppressed, such untruths may not be surprising.

But the sad thing is that the real bits of the ceremony were great: one billion TV viewers is still an incredibly impressive number and few, if any, previous Olympics have been total sell-outs.

In its desperation to be seen as the most perfect Games in human history, Beijing 2008 may have held itself to a standard that it cannot truthfully fulfil and created conditions which work against a totally successful event. There really is such a thing as trying too hard.