Strong demand for Vancouver Winter Olympics tickets

With a little over a year to go before the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, organizers are finding that demand for tickets is greater than they anticipated.

Traditionally, the Winter Games do not draw quite as many fans as the Summer Games, but organizers of the Vancouver Olympics released hundreds of thousands of tickets in October and early this month, which were reportedly snapped up by fans very quickly. Approximately 1.6 million tickets were slated to be released this fall.

The overwhelming response led organizers to rethink how they would handle releasing future blocks of tickets, settling on a lottery system under which lucky fans will find out in early December if they will have access to tickets. Among the most requested tickets were for men's and women's hockey, figure skating, the opening ceremonies and curling, according to officials.

Ticket prices range from a low of $25 for some preliminary events to $775 for the Gold Medal men's hockey game. Canadians, alone, requested nearly $350 million worth of tickets this fall, according to organizers, and on average fans were seeking about 15 tickets per request.

Although reselling tickets to the Vancouver Games won't be quite as strictly prohibited as the recent Beijing Summer Olympics, officials from Canada and the Olympics will not be permitted to resell tickets, and the Vancouver Olympic Committee plans to introduce a reselling Web site for fans to exchange tickets.