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Schedule released Sydney organizers make detailed schedule public
Posted: Sunday May 02, 1999 07:32 PM
SYDNEY, Australia (AP) -- Australians will have a month to decide what they want to see at the Sydney Olympics before tickets go on sale May 30 after a detailed event-by-event program was released by organizers Sunday. There will be 636 sessions lasting on average over two hours and including 1,700 heats, matches and games. Five million of the 9.6 million tickets will be avalable to the Australian public, who have 45 days to fill in their order forms in June and early July. Tickets will be on general sale outside Australia through national Olympic committees. In a reversal of Atlanta's policy in 1996, the Sydney Organizing Committee for the Olympic Games (SOCOG) decided to sell tickets to the international market first. "We've held back five million tickets just for Australians so when you put in for a high-profile event . . . you know that is your only chance to be in the draw for an over-subscribed event and there won't be tickets coming back from overseas, which caused confusion in Atlanta," said Olympics Minister and SOCOG president Michael Knight. For events expected to be over-subscribed, such as the opening and closing ceremonies and swimming finals, a random audited draw will be used to decide who gets the tickets. The International Amateur Athletic Federation is the only ruling body which has not signed off on its schedule, but SOCOG does not expect that to cause any problems. "We've studied in detail the Barcelona [athletics] schedule which was said by many to be a very, very good schedule," said SOCOG general manager or sport Bob Elphinston. "We looked in detail and followed the experiences of Atlanta which confronted for the first time the need to try and help the outstanding athletes who might want to double in more than one event." "The obvious example was Michael Johnson, where the program was changed very late to allow him the chance to compete in the 200 and 400 meters." The only change made was moving the start of the women's marathon from 7:45 a.m. to 9 a.m. at the request of Japanese broadcasters. The full competition schedule lists the detailed program for individual sports like athletics, swimming, cycling and rowing, but the picture is more complicated in the team sports, where most countries still have to qualify. There will be 19 sports contested on the first full day of competition on Sept. 16 -- the games officially begin on Sept. 15. By day two, 25 of the 28 sports will be underway, including all the team sports. The biggest day of the Games is Saturday, Sept. 23, with the 1,500-meter freestyle in the pool, men's and women's 100-meter sprints on the track, men's and women's cycling road races finals and half of the rowing finals. The second-last day of the Games on Sept. 30 is being promoted as Super Saturday, with 45 gold medals on offer, including women's basketball and men's field hockey. SOCOG chief executive Sandy Hollway told Seven television's Sportsworld program he expected "a little less than 50 percent" of the tickets t be snapped up from May 30. SOCOG has budgeted to receive 600 million Australian dollars ($400 million US) from ticket sales. The most expensive tickets are the top-priced opening and closing ceremonies seats at 1,362 Australian dollars ($885 US) with the cheapest 19 Australian dollars ($12.50 US) for preliminaries to sports such as softball, handball, equestrian and baseball.
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