Americans trying to buy tickets to the Tokyo Games yesterday reported technical outages, long delays and a lack of clear guidance from seller CoSport, with intense demand challenging the Olympic ticketing specialist to keep up. Yesterday marked the launch of live ticket sales in the U.S., giving anyone who failed to get seats in the earlier lotteries a chance to buy. Sales were supposed to start at 2:00pm ET, but 11 different people told THE DAILY they could not load the CoSport site by then, fighting error messages during those crucial minutes before getting in. Ohio resident Aimee Valle said, "I finally got a working site and a place in line at 2:24 PM with 21,232 people ahead of me. At this point, it's 5:21 and event tickets on a standalone basis are sold out for the US and only packages remain.” CoSport spokesperson Michael Kontos in a statement defended the site’s technical performance. He acknowledged that many fans were unable to purchase tickets, but said that was mostly because of the high demand. CoSport is working on obtaining more tickets from Tokyo 2020 and fans should watch for future sales, he said. “Thousands of people were able to access our site and purchase Olympic tickets today,” Kontos said. “In fact, at its peak, our waiting room was handling more than 26,000 requests without an outage. We regret if some customers had issues navigating the system, but initial reports are that the system worked for nearly everyone who logged on while tickets were available.”
HIGH DEMAND FOR TOKYO GAMES: The difficulties reflect extraordinary demand for the '20 Games, a stark contrast to the last three Olympics in South Korea, Brazil and Russia. Demand in Japan alone may outstrip supply tenfold, according to some experts. There are about 7.8 million tickets to the Olympics in all, but 70% of those are reserved for the Japanese market. Yesterday's demand was not a surprise, as CoSport in earlier lotteries described the interest as “record setting.” Fans were encouraged to pre-register, Kontos said, which should have smoothed the process yesterday. Some buyers reported problems with the random lotteries that preceded the live sales yesterday. Brant Feldman, an agent for several Olympians and Paralympians, complained that he could not get into his account for more than a week while he was waiting for lottery results. When he did get in, the price was not listed and he could not adjust his purchases. "Truly I am fed up with CoSport…. They should have been replaced YEARS AGO," Feldman wrote in an email. "They have had a monopoly in a space that should have been opened up to see what are the best practices that are out there with all of the global ticketing providers." New Jersey-based CoSport signed a 10-year deal with the USOC in '10 to be the exclusive seller of Olympic tickets in the U.S. It also controls various territories in Europe, the Middle East and Australia. A USOPC spokesperson did not return a message seeking comment.
