Tickets Please! Olympic Lottery is no Winner

Over the last two months we've all been unable to avoid Olympic Tickets Fever.

Millions of us applied for tickets, stashed the extra cash in our banks and waited (im)patiently for the funds to magically disappear confirming that we'd got our hands on one of Willy Wonka's Golden Tickets.

And we waited. And waited.

Until one day we were told: THIS IS IT!

The collective British sigh of disappointment was audible. Bank accounts were checked with increased desparation and frequency. The money was still there! Why haven't they taken it yet? Realisation dawned. We'd lucked out. There would be no visit to the chocolate factory.  

It's a tough job to manage the expectations of millions of people but the fall out from the disappointment has been well deserved. The Olympics PR team are guilty of setting high expectations, failing to manage them and rubbing salt in the wounds thereafter. All of which could have been easily avoided.

And they had every chance to get it right. The National Lottery has been doing it well for years.

The odds of winning the National Lottery are pure chance. So, it would seem, was the lottery for the Olympic Tickets. The Olympians failed to communicate, however, that we were all taking part in a nice big gamble. The odds, as we've subsequently found out, were much less than a 50/50 chance of being successful with 55% of applicants walking away with nothing at all.

The National Lottery manages expectations that the odds of winning the big one are around 14 million to one. So, every week, when we don't win, we simply shrug our shoulders and say "It was a long shot anyway, back to work on Monday!"

And they can't say they weren't warned. In an article published on 9th May, Matthew Beard from the London Evening Standard argued that Olympic Chiefs should be telling us just how big a gamble we've taken. He was not the only one to pose this argument. The media was awash with shock and awe stories of how people had maxed out their credit cards and faced financial ruin when (if) they were lucky enough to get all they purchased. The rest of us smugly looked on thinking: idiots.

But it turns out they were the sassy ones. The seasoned gamblers who got it at once. Spread betting was the only answer. The odds of winning were so exceptionally low it was the sheer number of bets that counted. That was the only way you could increase your odds.

Official advice ran contrary to this, however, and this is where the corporate line failed to deliver. The lottery system would be "fair", only buy what you can afford, everyone has the same chance of getting tickets. So the vast majority of Britain did what they were told and totally lucked out.

An inevitable backlash ensued.

"UNFAIR!" cried Britain.

"NOT SO!" cried the heartless Coe. Completely missing the point.

Coe continues to defend the "system" but fails to understand it's not the system that was the failure, it was their communication strategy that was the ultimate patsy.

The key messages failed to come across. The punters were clueless to the kind of gamble they were taking. And now hundreds of thousands of people, finally understanding the odds, are to be given a second chance gamble. But will they be flocking to the Ticketmaster Casino in their droves?

Fool me once: Shame on You. Fool me twice: Shame on Me.

Lord Coe can rest easy. The Olympic "goals" will have been met: The event is on target to sell out. It's just that Britain won't be quite as engaged in his Olympic dream as they once were.

Shame. Because that's really what the whole point of the Olymics: Dreams.