Hosting the Olympics has been a harsh affair. We’ve had to temporarily (hopefully!) transformed into a semi-totalitarian state.
But on the flip side, we get to go to the Olympics. Or do we?
The Olympic Stadium holds 80,000 people. So even if you allocate a rather large amount of 800 tickets to sponsors and other interests in the private sector, that still means we can sell 99% of tickets to the generic public. But apparently not. Only 75% of the tickets have gone on sale to the general public. When it comes to the high profile events, that already rather low number of 75% drops to 35%!
But, of course, you have to give some to the private sector. They’re paying for the games after all. Otherwise, the tax payer would have to foot the bill. But, as it turns out, and we all knew already, we are footing the bill.
According to the Guardian, sponsors have contributed £1 billion of funding. They’ve made the data available for free too. The Guardian is actually being generous here – a report by Parliament puts the figure even lower.
Meanwhile, the total cost was reported to the House of Parliament as being around £12 billion. Jules Boykoff points out this isn’t entirely accurate though and, indeed, according to Sky Sports, the figure is actually around the £24 billion mark.
So do the maths on that one. We’re footing 92% to 96% of the cost, yet we’re getting 35% – 75% of the tickets.
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Tags: injustice, london 2012, money, olympics, tax
This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 24th, 2012 at 12:46 pm and is filed under Religion & Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.