Around 600,000 Paris Olympics tickets still available – including 100m finals

Up to 600,000 Olympics tickets remain unsold five days from Paris’s opening ceremony, including for the 100m finals and Josh Kerr’s attempt to win 1,500m gold.

There are also still 4,000 available for Friday’s curtain-raiser, although the only seats remaining are in the most expensive categories between £758 and £2,300.

Organisers confirmed at a Paris press conference that more than 20 sports still have seats spare, partly due to late releases of tickets and contingency planning.

There is surprise at remaining availability for major nights on the track at the Stade de France in some of the cheaper seats, however. Seats from £71 are yet to be snapped up to watch the 1,500m men’s finals, which could feature top British medal hope Kerr, and the 200m women’s finals. Tickets also remain spare for the women’s 100m final a week on Saturday, while £248 seats are still on sale for the men’s 100m final the next evening.

Paris 2024 president Tony Estanguet, a three-time Olympic champion canoeist, dismissed any suggestion that ticket availability reflected any lack of interest in France.

There are often empty seats at some big stadium events such as the football, with 264,000 tickets going unsold in 2012 despite huge demand at the London Olympics.

Paris is also doing significantly better than Rio 2016 at this stage, with Brazil organisers still attempting to shift 1.3 million tickets at this same stage ahead of the Games. There were no spectators at all at Tokyo 2020 due to Covid restrictions.

Estanguet explained that many tickets still on sale were available thanks to “contingency”. “In total at the beginning, we had 10 million tickets but we took 20 per cent of the total numbers in contingency,” he explained. Over the past six months, “new ticket opportunities” had been released, he added. “That’s why there are still tickets available one week before because now we now have the final plan of the delivery,” he said. So far, Paris has sold 8.8million tickets.

With spectators starting to arrive in Paris, Estanguet also defended in increase in the price of Metro tickets by almost double in some instances. He explained the increase will help cover the cost of extra services for millions more visitors in the capital during the Games.

“The reason behind this price was because we had to reinforce the transport plan during the Games of 15 per cent more than is usual for this time of year,” he explained.

“So there is an important cost of this public transfer offer and a decision was made not to impact the [regular] users of the Paris public transport system but we didn’t want them to have to pay for the cost of the Games. We will transfer part of the additional cost to the ones who will use it specifically for the Games. That’s why this was the decision to increase this price.”

He added that a daily travel card of 16 euros “a very attractive proposition”. Preparations ahead of the Games appear smooth, he added. Concerns around water quality in the River Seine have eased, with the latest tests showing it will be safe to host triathletes.

Olympics chiefs insist Paris can deal with Russian cyber attacks

Olympics chiefs insisted Paris 2024 remains equipped to combat likely Russian cyber attacks after its IT systems were temporarily floored by the global Microsoft outage.

The Games’ head of IT security was understood to have been woken up at 2am on Friday as the systems went into meltdown a week from the Games’ opening ceremony.

However, with the Olympics identified as a major threat for cyber attackers, embattled US cybersecurity company CrowdStrike resolved its system failure as a priority over other companies.

There were hold ups approving accreditation for those working in Paris, but all issues with issuing tickets for the first paperless Games in history were avoided.

Mark Adams, the IOC’s spokesman, later moved to dismiss fears that the situation had left IT systems vulnerable after warnings of potential state-sponsored cyber attacks on the Games.

Intelligence experts at Google subsidiary Mandiant had forecast in recent days with “high confidence” that Russian threat groups pose the “highest risk”, with the nation’s athletes forced to compete as neutrals following the war on Ukraine. “France may face an elevated risk of Russian cyber threat activity,” a report stated, “given the country’s financial and military support for Ukraine after Russia’s invasion in February 2022.”

Adams, however, explained there “were some significant problems on the morning” of the IT failure “but it was dealt with” and “it was quite a good rehearsal” for dealing with any other issues.

“Cyber attacks are part of everyone’s daily life nowadays,” he said. “There are phishing attempts everywhere. And the Olympic Games is a huge target, always. It always used to be a media target and the campaign target and now it’s also a phishing target for those kind of attacks. We needless to say have a huge amount of safeguards in place, both ourselves, our partners and Paris 2024.... we are very, very prepared. You can never be too prepared.”

In 2018, the official Winter Olympics website was taken offline after being hit by a cyber-attack just before the beginning of the opening ceremony in Pyeongchang, South Korea.

“We had a pretty close call in PyeongChang, so we have experience and know what we’re looking for,” Adams added. “And I think as far as we can, we have every confidence to know how to deal with it.”