The Olympic Games are the ultimate Crime Traveller destination. But make no mistake – if you thought a quadruple lutz was tricky, I challenge you to get a pair of seats to a Canadian Olympic men’s hockey match in Vancouver next year. I can assure you, landing the latter is far more difficult.
Back in October 2008, Phase 1 of the Olympic ticket process opened to Canadian residents and I was caught uncharacteristically unaware. In a rare moment of laser focus on my trial practice, I ignored the invitation to enter my name in the ticket lottery. Trials come and go virtually every week…the Olympic Winter Games roll around only every four years and this is only the second time in history that they will be played on Canadian soil. Fortunately my law partner was not so distracted and by sheer good fortune won a cache of tickets to several hockey games (including Team Canada vs. Norway) and a Canadian curling match. With these few tickets in hand, I turned all my attention to building the perfect Vancouver 2010 holiday.
Step one: ditch the dead weight. There would be no children on this trip. Even The Crime Traveller’s Wife had to concede that being dragged from event to event on a schedule that involved eight consecutive days of 20+ waking hours wasn’t sounding quite like her idea of a vacation. I informed her of my desire to spend four hours one morning watching women’s curling followed by standing for five hours outside in the cold as athletes barrelled down the bobsleigh and skeleton tracks. Her response was categorical and predictable: “I spent two weeks of my summer wearing long johns in Alaska. Have a blast in Vancouver. I’m taking the kids to Florida.” Touché.
I immediately recruited a new travelling companion — a close friend who, entirely coincidentally (cough, cough), had parents residing in Vancouver. Accommodations confirmed, I hit up Air Canada for flight information. Not surprisingly, even six months in advance, flights into Vancouver were commanding a significant price premium. But with some creative routing (a few hours in Edmonton never killed anyone…well, hardly anyone) we secured business class return tickets using our Aeroplan rewards points.
I now had a place to stay for eight days, return airfare and a measly three ticketed events. A quick review of eBay and Craigslist left me despondent…tickets were being hawked at three to ten times face value depending on the event. Outclassed in the cash department, I began working every connection in my BlackBerry for Olympic ticket leads. I hit up an old law school friend working as counsel to Intrawest — the owners of Whistler-Blackcomb. No dice. When a judge on a fraud case of mine scheduled an upcoming trial around his own Olympic travel plans, I beseeched him on the record for extra tickets. Motion denied. I even resorted to collecting empty Powerade bottles from my weekly hockey game in a desperate bid to collect enough wrappers to win tickets. Sorry, try again.
Then, a miracle. Having Twittered and Facebooked my Herculean efforts to secure tickets to hundreds of followers, I became aware of a limited number of tickets that would be released in September to employees of Olympic national sponsors. I gathered a team of Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) employees at separate locations on the fateful day. The tickets would be released through an internal RBC website at precisely 1:00 p.m. Eastern Standard Time. My law office turned into a scene reminiscent of Wall Street’s Gordon Gecko at his finest — only with smaller cell phones. Laptops, speakerphones and BlackBerries connected everyone to my hub. I rallied the troops at 12:55 p.m. advising those at my stock broker’s office that “this will be the most important trade of your life.” At 1:00 p.m., 6,000 tickets were released. By 1:09pm they were gone. Amidst the carnage, I emerged with tickets to three new events.
The final phase for the remaining 100,000 tickets was set to launch to the general public on November 7 at 1:00 p.m. Anticipation was at a fever pitch and demand was at a high point rarely, if ever, seen in previous Olympic sales. Apparently, the only people who didn’t expect such an overwhelming interest in the tickets were the Vancouver 2010 organizing committee. Three seconds after the website opened for business, ticket servers melted into slag as the site was pinged into oblivion. After hitting “refresh” on my browser every twenty seconds for two hours and 13 minutes, the Olympic ticketing site admitted defeat, posting a brief apology and rescheduling the sale for the following week.
The second attempt was only a mild improvement. A “virtual waiting room” was implemented, placing the thousands of ticket-seekers into digital purgatory as the system randomly selected new lucky entrants to the ticketing site every 30 seconds. The minutes stretched into hours as Quatchi, one of Vancouver’s four outlandish Olympic mascots, stared at me with his unblinking, vacant eyes from the Olympic website, the agony building as more and more events were added to the growing “SOLD OUT” list at the bottom of the page. Finally, after four hours and 18 minutes, my turn to pick over the remaining scraps came and I was pleasantly surprised to emerge with tickets to two Victory Celebration medal ceremonies along with both women’s hockey semi-final games.
With only two months to go, stay tuned to @CrimeTraveller and watch this space for my coverage of Vancouver 2010.
When not jetting around the world as his alter ego, The Crime Traveller, Edward Prutschi is a Toronto-based criminal defence lawyer. Follow Ed’s criminal law commentary (@prutschi) and The Crime Traveller’s adventures (@crimetraveller) on Twitter, read his Crime Traveller blog, or email ed@thecrimetraveller.com.
Photo by Jeff Wilcox