Flashes of Panic

Nicole linked this BusinessWeek story about Olympic tickets in China.

I clicked the link thinking about the IAAF staff, and how they grumbled about empty seats in the stands during the evening sessions in Osaka, and how the Helsinki fans were so dedicated. And certainly BusinessWeek does a good job with the task at hand, comparing Beijing ticket sales with those in Athens.

But then I drifted back to my first international track meet. Not the ‘99 World Championships, but the 1994 Goodwill Games (remember the Goodwill Games?), which were conveniently held in St. Petersburg, where I happened to be attempting to kick-start my Russian language skills. (I failed, but the trip was still worth it.) I don’t recall what ticket prices were in dollars, nor what they might have cost had I attempted to buy them in the States; I remember that in rubles, they were pretty attainable, at least for those of us who bought our rubles with real dollars.

I went with a small group of fellow students to the Games headquarters on the north side of the Neva to buy tickets. We didn’t have to wait in line very long, but then we filled out forms identifying ourselves and what tickets we wanted. I was the only one interested in track (nearly all of us went to a night of figure skating, a surreal sight in the sweltering summer Piter had that year.) I got two tickets in the “cheap seats,” close to the front but about 20m around the first corner, and took the daughter of the family I was staying with. No problems; the Russians were largely disinterested in the “Games of Good Will” except as a means of attracting tourists, and most of them remained out in the countryside if they possibly could.

When the competition day arrived, we brought cookies and bananas and sandwiches, and saw the women’s 100m and men’s 800m and 10,000m. Maybe there was some pole vaulting going on. Her hero was Irina Privalova, but I think Gail Devers won the 100m. Marc Coogan (I think?) and Ed Eyestone ran the 10,000m for the USA; it was won by a Moroccan, I think, but the Russian was second, and when he came to the finish line I heard the crowd chanting, “Mo - lo - DYETS!” which translates as something close to “Good job!” I hollered “Good job, Ed!” to Eyestone as they walked off the track, and he looked back up at me; some years later, when he was meeting the RW staff and I went on a lunchtime run with him, I reminded him of that, and neither of us were surprised that he remembered the race but not some random guy in the stands who yelled to him afterwards.

A few days later, the women’s 10,000m was on TV, and my host-father and I watched at the kitchen table. I think there was an Ethiopian or Kenyan woman who ran away with the race, but Gwyn Coogan and the Russian entrant dueled to the line for second, and the two of us—who could only barely communicate, given my weak grasp of his language—rose from our seats, yelling at the screen and pounding on the table, and for a few moments we understood each other with perfect clarity.

I think it was probably possible to pick up a few last-minute tickets to the World Championships in Osaka, if you happened to have been in town, but the price probably wouldn’t have been as cheap as those ruble tickets in Petersburg. I wonder if it has ever been possible to get such tickets to the Olympics—at least, in the last twenty or thirty years?

Now Playing: In Between Days from Speed Graphic (EP) by Ben Folds

Technorati Tags: athletics, china, goodwill games, olympics, russia, St. Petersburg, track and field