The second round sale, open exclusively to the people who applied in the initial application phase earlier this year but were not allocated any tickets, began at 6am this morning with the remaining 2.3 million tickets for the Olympics available on a first-come, first-served basis.

The exclusive sale is open for ten days until July 17 before they become available to a wider audience but a huge surge of people all applying straight away saw the website come to a standstill just minutes after the sale begun leaving those desperate for tickets in complete frustration.

London 2011 denied that it had crashed and that they only blocked people out of it.

"Like rush hour on the tubes we held people at the gates for a while whilst the platform cleared," a spokesman told insidethegames.

"The system is transacting.

"We had to hold some people back at the gates due to high demand but people have been transacting since 6am."

Even those who did manage to submit their application were left worried that they had not got tickets when an issue with the delivery of confirmation emails emerged but London 2012 have urged applicants to check their spam folders or to directly check their account on the website.

The London 2012 Olympic ticketing policy had already come under fire for a perceived lack of transparency in the first round process after fans had money withdrawn from their account without knowing what events they were seeing and the website problems in the second round of sales would not have helped change attitudes towards it.

High profile athletes to have criticised the scheme include triple Olympic gold medal cyclist Bradley Wiggins who has described it as a "shambles".

"I think, as most of the public feels, it's a bit of a shambles the ticket allocation," said the 31-year-old who won medals at the last three Games and hopes to compete at London 2012 in pursuit of a fourth gold, which will leave him just one short of the British record held by rower Sir Steve Redgrave.

"It's a shame when you know what works so successfully in other Olympic Games, certainly Athens, that they couldn't implement those ticket systems here."

The second round of sales includes tickets for 310 sessions, including 44 medal events, but 1.7 million of the tickets are for football matches.

There have already been sell-outs for 21 events including the Opening and Closing Ceremonies, diving, swimming and tennis.

London 2012 was flooded with 22 million requests from 1.9 million people in the first round of sales when 6.6 million tickets were originally made available to the public but nearly two-thirds missed out, with only 700,000 receiving tickets for the Games.

Meanwhile, applicants who received tickets in the first round of sales will also get another chance to purchase tickets in the second round from 6am on July 8 to 6pm on July 17.

Contact the writer of this story at [email protected]


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