Lisa Markwell: It's a new Olympic sport – the race to sell tickets

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Just 64 days to go. Sixty four days till the Olympics is over, as the already-old joke goes. You can see that fatigue has set in among Londoners already, in their weary tread on the Underground staircase (while the escalator undergoes “essential maintenance for the Games”). Also, there appears to be competitive holiday booking – who can get away further, for longer, during the London 2012 fortnight.

No doubt for many the early-onset ennui will be replaced with a moderate level of enthusiasm once the Games begin, when it will be permissible to sit in front of the telly all day drinking on-offer supermarket beer and perving over Tom Daley and Victoria Pendleton. And we will be, won't we, sitting on the sofa? Most of us aren't going to any events because WE DIDN'T GET TICKETS.

But I must wipe away the spittle-flecked fury I've been cultivating for one moment, the fury I felt when, once, twice, and almost three times I failed to purchase tickets for London 2012. It turns out that I needn't have panicked and bought crappy back-row first-round rubbish seats for the table tennis. Today another slew of 43,000 tickets goes on sale in a last-ever, must-have, honest-guv, you-can-trust-us development.

And unlike all the other convoluted systems designed to make us claw our own eyeballs out with our Visa cards (because only Visa cards are accepted), this will be a straightforward first-come, first-served sale. There's just the one problem: pretty much anyone with a passing interest in the Olympics has bought their tickets and doesn't have any money left for more. Or they've spent their money on a week in a darling little gite in France instead. Or on a hundred M&S chocolate salted caramel eclairs (trust me, they're worth it). Available tickets for the opening and closing ceremony and six sports are – imagine my surprise – at the most expensive end of the range.

The real shock news is that the beach volleyball hasn't sold out, despite every man I meet rubbing their thighs and huh-huhing whenever it's mentioned. Perhaps they've sated their desire to see scantily clad girls by doing what I wearily suggest each time the sport is mentioned – buying a top-shelf mag.

Sports Minister Hugh Robertson admitted yesterday that he expected to "get some stick" when the truth about who was allocated what, ticket-wise, is made public after the Games. Relax, Hugh baby. It sounds like there will be quite a few more last-chance opportunities for tickets before 27 July. Anyone with cash to burn, a strong pair of binoculars and an ardent desire to see Fiji play football has nothing to complain about...

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