Olympic tickets: Got any spares?

Your perception of whether the Olympic ticket ballot was fair will probably depend on whether you ended up with front row seats or whether, like the mum of double Olympic champion Bradley Wiggins , you got nothing at all. There have been PR embarrassments but was the ticketing system essentially unjust? The insistence that buyers could pay only using a Visa card was an unnecessary stipulation, a gift of exclusivity for a sponsor. One might also wonder if it were beyond the wit of the system's designers to ensure that tickets were more evenly spread. Some ended up with plenty; others none at all. The ticket chaos has brought an air of disappointment to an otherwise impressive process. The site itself has been all but completed on time and on budget: Lord Coe and his team have managed to attract all their required sponsorship. And, as those of us fighting on Friday morning in our pyjamas to get ringside for the Greco-Roman can attest, the Games are pretty much sold out. Even if you are now set to watch it on TV, that looks a lot like an unlikely victory.