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You order tickets through Cartan, the official ticket seller of the Games. You call them and they send you a big brochure listing all the events, their dates, times and venues. Figuring out which ones you want to go to out of 28 events, and the logistics -- can you make it from the Aquilina Reserve softball venue to the Bondi Beach volleyball site in 45 minutes? -- is hard enough. And on top of that, you have to do the Type I and Type II ticket juggle.

Here's how this works. There are two types of events: Type I and Type II. Type I events are the big, glamorous, more expensive ones -- the gymnastics finals, the opening and closing ceremonies, major track and field events, the basketball and soccer finals, and so on. Type II events include some of the preliminaries in the glamour events, but they are largely made up of those athletic contests that appear on Olympic TV coverage, if at all, right after "Modern Farmer" at 5 a.m. Rowing. Dressage. Table tennis. Fencing. Modern pentathlon. Archery. Synchronized swimming. Badminton. Kayak. Handball. Field hockey. Shooting. Sailing. Tae kwon do. Greco-Roman wrestling. The championship rounds of these less-popular events are Type I tickets, but mostly they're Type II.

The catch is, for every Type I ticket you order, you have to order a Type II. This rule prevents the unseemly spectacle of two world-class badminton players battling for eternal Olympic glory before an audience consisting of their mothers, Bertie Wooster, a dozing drunk and somebody who stumbled in looking for the Badfinger concert, but it makes the ticket-ordering decision interesting. Do you front-load Type I tickets, going to a lot of hot-shot swimming and gymnastics in the first week of the Games and paying for it later in the bitter coin of modern pentathlon? (And just why do they call it "modern" pentathlon, anyway? If they've abandoned "ancient pentathlon," whatever that is -- a combo chariot race/cuneiform tablet speed-writing/reading the entrails of a goat kinda thing? -- why not just call it "pentathlon"? And if it's "modern pentathlon" today, what's to prevent it from becoming "postmodern pentathlon" tomorrow -- with all the nauseating self-referentiality and lack of rules that implies?) Or do you mix and match on a daily basis, bringing yourself down from a baseball-final high with a humbling dose of preliminary rowing?

I opted for the latter, going back and forth from gymnastics to judo, basketball to table tennis. By the time I was done, I ended up as intrigued by the small-time events as by the big ones; I was brooding bitterly over having to choose between Greco-Roman wrestling and trampolining. Besides, there probably aren't any bad events at the Summer Games. Not really bad. You may scoff at sailing, but I've watched curling.

Finally, there's the little matter of payment. Doing the Games right turns out to require a bank account of Zeus-like proportions. Tickets range from $8 to $1,054, with good tickets for major events like swimming, gymnastics, track and basketball going in the range of $100-$350. I ordered 40 tickets, covering almost all the major events for the entire 16 days of the Games -- two-plus events a day, on average. Had I gotten everything I asked for, the price would have been $5,898. Several big-ticket events, including the outlandishly expensive opening and closing ceremonies, were sold out, but the final damage was still $4,026. Throw in air fare and the brutally expensive accommodation (there is almost nothing to be had in Sydney for under $250 a night) and it becomes readily apparent why very few Americans who aren't on junkets or some type of scam will be in the stands at the Olympics. Groups of 30 Coke executives wearing identical red jackets, yes -- just plain folks who are into track and field, no.

Everyman may not be there, but I'm still going to try to stand in for him. I can't wait for September. Cronies or no cronies, keep that torch moving!
salon.com | May 12, 2000

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