A new twist in the quest for Olympic tickets… we’ve heard that Olympic tickets are unavailable (without a small fortune and a well-connected scalper, that is!) but it looks like a LOT of tickets have gone unsold.

The Beijing Olympics Organizing Committee (BOCOG) reports that only 450,000 tickets for this summer鈥檚 Olympic Games have been successfully allocated, accounting for about a quarter of the tickets available for sale in the second phase.

More than 700,000 orders for 4.2 million tickets were received by BOCOG, but only 123,000 bookings were confirmed after a computerized random draw.

Though BOCOG didn鈥檛 give a reason why about 75% of the tickets remain unsold it is fairly obvious 鈥� and this is confirmed from the experience of every previous Olymic Games 鈥� that some popular events were extremely over-subscribed while the rest of the events were in lesser demand. For example, the number of people who want to go and watch the equestrian dressage contests is finite

Should be interesting to watch this one unfold, and see if there are some events with available tickets right up until the day.

Via China Economic Review