Olympic Ticket Ballot: Last Minute Strategy Update

Less than 48 hours to go now to send your entry in for the Olympic ticket ballot and, like us, you may still be hesitating before clicking the Buy Now button. Do you need to go one price level higher? Do you have any chance of success if you only try for that event on one day?

Obviously, there's been no indication from LOCOG or any other Olympic body as to how the entries are panning out so far, though some have speculated that obvious draws like the opening ceremony, sports where Brits have good medal chances or anything involving Usain Bolt are likely to be heavily oversubscribed.

On Sunday tea-time, as ballot entries were predicted to reach their final crescendo, people were busy Twittering and Facebooking excitedly away about what they'd been bidding for. We reasoned the intensity of that messaging might give a decent barometer of the overall level of interest in tickets for particular sports.

There are some caveats, such as we wouldn't be picking up this way on the continental European craving for things like handball and water polo and you should take into account how many tickets are actually available (for football, for example), but when we saw the results, they looked to us like a surprisingly plausible order of British public preference.

In the table that follows Google "realtime" searches have been used to find the most recent ten messages that conform to the search "Olympic +tickets [name of sport]". The date given is the date of the tenth post, apart from for the two sports that didn't register ten. It's not rigourously scientific, of course, but we offer it as our thumbnail guide to those last minute buying dilemmas.

Photo by McTumshie via the Londonist Flickrpool