May 24, 2008	Saturday	Jamadi-ul-Awwal 18, 1429

SHANGHAI, May 23: Every event in every venue for the Beijing Olympics will be sold, Ticketmaster’s president for China forecast on Friday.

“We predict that this will be the first Olympics that it’s a ‘sold out’ Olympics,” Jonathan Krane, whose company is the official ticketing provider and sponsor for August’s games, said in an interview.

Krane was confident that all 6.8 million Olympics tickets would be sold, although he would not say exactly when.

“It’s very close,” said Krane, who became president of Ticketmaster China last year after it acquired Emma Entertainment, a China-based ticketing and promotions company he set up in 2004.

“Certain events are always sold out during the Olympics, but to have every event sold out, that’s something that’s very positive and it doesn’t always happen,” he added.

Ticket sales for past Olympics varied widely.

Some sports, like basketball, had been surefire sellers. Others, like modern pentathlon and team handball, less so.

“You have so many events and all these different huge stadiums, lots of different venues with a lot of different events, there’s a lot of tickets,” said Krane, who later in the day ran a leg of the Olympic torch relay in Shanghai.

The 2004 Athens Olympics sold only about two-thirds of 5.3 million tickets available. There were many empty seats.

The sales potential for China is strong due to its population of 1.3 billion people and the relative novelty of hosting a large international event. There’s also a strong black market for tickets, though that problem is not unique to Beijing.

Earlier this month, Olympic organisers announced that all domestic-sale tickets for events in Beijing were completely sold out.—AP