May 08, 2008	Thursday	Jamadi-ul-Awwal 2, 1429

BEIJING, May 7: Domestic tickets for all the Olympic events in Beijing and Hong Kong have been booked out, Games organisers said, as the official ticketing website experienced 27 million hits in the first hour of sale.

Only tickets for soccer qualifiers in other Chinese cities were still available.

On Monday, a total of 1.38 million tickets for 16 sports, including boxing, soccer, volleyball and basketball, went on sale in the third batch of tickets issued in China. Hong Kong will hold equestrian events.

A mass scramble to book tickets prompted long queues at Bank of China outlets and saw the official ticketing website struggle to cope with millions of hits.

“Today is the third day of sales for the third batch of Olympic tickets. It is true that all tickets for Beijing and Hong Kong events have been allocated,” Wang Hui, Beijing Organising Committee of the Olympic Games (BOCOG) spokeswoman, told a news conference on Wednesday.

Wang, however, said “a few” tickets could become available if ticket-holders failed to hand over payment by May 14, or neglected to pick up their tickets.

“Just because they have all been booked, it doesn’t mean they have been sold... It is possible these (uncollected) tickets may be sold at venues. This may be another opportunity,” Wang said, without providing details.

On Monday, prospective buyers complained on blogs and Internet chat rooms of being unable to complete purchases, despite being able to log on to the website and select tickets fairly smoothly.

The third batch’s opening day of sale was nonetheless an improvement on that of the previous batch, which saw the website crash and the former director of the Beijing Olympic Ticketing Centre sacked in November.

Wang defended the ticketing website’s performance. “In the first hour of sale for the second batch of tickets, there were 8 million hits. In the first hour of sale for the third batch, there were 27 million hits. But our website did not crash.”—Reuters