Unwanted Olympics tickets spiral to more than quarter of a million over Paris concerns

More than a quarter of a million tickets for the Olympics are now available on resale websites with four days remaining until the opening ceremony.

The number of unwanted tickets has come to light after organisers confirmed on the weekend that up to 600,000 tickets remained on general sale.

Analysis first carried out by the Financial Times show listings on resale sites rose to 270,465 on Monday, up from about 180,000 a month ago.

The most expensive are set at €2,970 but fans have expressed surprise on social media that face value cheaper athletics tickets remain available.

The surplus comes days after organisers insisted there was no shortage in appetite for tickets. Among the hundreds of thousands still available on official channels were seats for Friday’s curtain-raiser early on Tuesday.

Tony Estanguet, the Paris 2024 president and a three-time Olympic champion canoeist, has repeatedly dismissed any suggestion that ticket availability reflected a lack of enthusiasm.

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 just a week ahead of the Games. There were no spectators at all at Tokyo 2020 due to Covid restrictions. Estanguet explained that many tickets still on general 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 8.8 million tickets.