The Olympics without VIP treatment

After an all too short visit with the how the other side lives, I was left on my own to get tickets to the sold out events. I figured I would just spend a day wandering around the Olympic Green grounds, but found out that you can't enter the area where most of the games are unless you have a ticket for that day for an event on the Green. After 3 days of running around, I finally had time to enjoy the grounds, but now I didn't have a ticket to get in there. The first few days of the Olympics, the security was over the top. They literally searched every pocket of my backpack and made me use everything from my lip balm down to my inhaler. They confiscated water bottles and lighters on the spot. But after a few days the security scaled back to just Xray scans, cursory checks of your bags and a wave of the magic wand over your body.

Poland

I was told about a website that sells tickets to citizens of certain countries. It was very difficult to get tickets, but every once in awhile you'd be able to get an allotment for various sports. After a few days of fruitless searching, I turned to Craigslist and found a few tickets through there for face value or just above. A few days later, I went back to Cosport and found tickets for boxing and women's football gold medal match. I bought 2 tickets for each event hoping to spread out the $30 ticketing fee. What I didn't know was that the bast*rds charge another 50% on top of the face value of the ticket in addition to the $30 processing fee. So for 4 tickets, I had paid $332 when the face value was only $12 for boxing and $80 for the football. Now, I had the unfortunate problem of unloading my extra ticket at double and triple the face value just to get my money back. Cosport is worse than Ticketmaster! I will never order from them again! The worst thing was that if I had just waited a couple days, I could have gotten football tickets for nothing or next to nothing. There were so many extra tickets being sold outside the game that I saw 2 tickets go for 100Y and a couple Americans dressed in red, white and blue draped in a flag get a free ticket.

Blue Skies in Beijing

For other tickets, there were a lot of scalpers waiting outside the entrance to the Metro station just outside the green, but they were asking ridiculous prices up to 10 times the face value of the tickets. These bastards wouldn't know the spirit of the Olympics if it bit them in the *ss. It was amazing how cheap the face value of the tickets were for many of the events. I saw tickets for boxing as low at $4 for an early round. Basketball between Lithuania and Croatia was about $12. The most expensive ticket that I had seen up 'til then was $30 for low seats right off the net for beach volleyball. But at the subway entrance, people were asking up to $2000 for hot tickets like Track and Field and the Gold Medal Football and Basketball matches.

Lithuania v Croatia

Although it was sad when China's best hope for gold in Track and Field dropped out due to an injury, I laughed at the scalpers that were holding out for $2000 as about 60% of the stadium left when Liu Xiang pulled out of the event because of an Achilles injury. I think that showed very poor taste, on the crowd's part. This is the Olympics after all. One of the highlights of the Olympics for me was when I was in the Bird's Nest and the crowd was cheering on a Moroccan runner that was a full minute behind the Gold Medalist in the 3000M steeplechase. He ran his last lap around the track saluting the crowd and blowing us kisses. It wasn't so much about winning for him as it was about competing and representing his country. It was a beautiful moment that reminded me about Eric Moussambani swimming for Equatorial Guinea in the 2000 Olympic games for the first time in his life. If you don't remember this classic Olympic moment, he was one of 3 swimmers in Heat 1 for the Men's 100M freestyle. The other two guys false started and were disqualified. Eric seemed a bit hesitant to jump in at all. He swam the 100M in an Olympic record slowest time of about 1:53 compared to the then world record of 48 seconds. After the crowd finished laughing and realized that he wasn't going to drown, everyone started cheering him on to the finish. After winning the first heat, he said he felt good and happy. Speedo later went on to sponsor him with a sleek new swimming suit and he was dubbed Eric the Eel. Unfortunately, aside from here you probably won't hear again about HACHLAF Abdelkader, but I think he will remember his shining minute alone on the track in the Bird's Nest the rest of his life.

100 Photos Later

Iran v Argentina