WEST VANCOUVER, B.C. — Some 28,000 fans who were willing to stand in the cold — rain, shine or snow — to watch events on Cypress Mountain won’t even get the chance to enjoy the hardship.
Olympic organizers have cancelled a further 20,000 standing-room tickets for snowboard and ski-cross events, a result of the rain that has turned the troubled venue into a muddy, unsafe mess.
The cancellations follow 8,000 tickets that were declared null earlier in the week for snowboarding events on Monday and Tuesday, including the one where Canada won gold Tuesday.
The most recent cancellations affect men’s and women’s snowboard halfpipe for Wednesday and Thursday, ski cross on Feb. 21 and 23 and snowboard parallel giant slalom on Feb. 26 and 27.
“We made every effort that we could make and we know we have people from all over coming here,” said Caley Denton, the organizing committee’s vice-president of ticketing. “We hope that if someone’s made a long trip, that they’ve come for more than one event and that they can get to other events around the city.”
The weather in Cypress has been a major concern for more than a month as a paucity of snow has been made worse by rain.
Organizers spent weeks hauling snow from as far away as Yak Peak, two hours to the east, and constructed the courses on Cypress by covering bales of hay with the imported snow.
The standing-room area was built the same way, but with thousands of pairs of feet pounding down the snow and combined with the rain, the hay has become exposed, said Denton.
“It’s not like we’re talking 50 and 100 people watching it, we’re talking thousands of people,” he said.
“The snow has washed away to the point where people can punch through and potentially step in between where there’s two big straw bales, and that becomes a pretty deep crack where we’ve had people going down to their knees and in some cases even farther.”
Maelle Ricker, who won Canada’s second gold medal Tuesday in the snowboard cross event, said despite the troubles, the atmosphere at the venue was electric.
“My friends and family that did manage to come up and watch did an awesome job, (along with) everybody that was cheering all the riders on,” she said, but she added that she’s “disappointed they weren’t able to bring in as many people as planned.
“I still think the people that were out there today held their own.”
The standing room section accounted for about 40 per cent of the spectators at the events. The tickets were priced between $50 and $65.
The ticket price will be refunded, as will the price of the bus ticket up the mountain.
The whole process will cost the organizing committee, known as VANOC, about $1.5 million, though that’s a tiny fraction of overall ticket revenue, which is estimated at just over $260 million.
Renee Smith-Valade, VANOC’s spokeswoman, said the money is within the committee’s contingency.
Denton said he doesn’t expect any further ticket cancellations, including for the aerials competitions, which will also be held on Cypress Mountain.
Officials with VANOC and the International Olympic Committee have been forced to douse flaming opinion columns in the international media, with one newspaper questioning whether these are the worst Winter Olympics in history, partly because of the troubles at Cypress.
But Mark Adams, a spokesman for the IOC, noted that Winter Olympic cities often have to deal with unpredictable weather.
“Weather is always a problem,” he said. “I’d also like to remind people that, although it may not feel like it, we are only at Day 4. We have good weather prospects, I’m hoping that in a week’s time this will be a dim, distant memory.”
Denton said organizers are also aware that some seats dedicated to members of the so-called Olympic family — sponsors and other national Olympic committees — are going unfilled. Empty seats while members of the general public struggle to get their hands on tickets has long been a public relations problem for Games committees.
In this case, Denton said VANOC is working to figure out who is letting the seats go empty so plans for redistribution can be made.
“When we’re finding those very specific blocks, we’re digging down into quite specific detail and finding out who it is or what it is and trying to adjust it. We continue to do that and we expect it to get better as the Games go on.”