【英译汉】
For more than a year, many Londoners have complained about their inability to obtain Olympic tickets, especially for marquee events like swimming and gymnastics. Then on Saturday, the first full day of competition here revealed unsightly swaths of empty seats at marquee events like swimming and gymnastics.
How did that happen? Blame a mix of prime tickets that go unused by corporate sponsors, international sports federations and rights holders. Adding to the unfortunate visuals: Bored media stayed away in droves for preliminary competitions in some sports. This is a common Olympics phenomenon, especially early in the Games when medals aren't yet on the line.
As a result, patches of empty seats were visible Saturday morning at North Greenwich Arena, where men's gymnastics qualifying was under way. The same was true at the Aquatics Center, where superstar Michael Phelps swam in preliminary heats. At Wimbledon, Serena Williams played at a mostly crowded Centre Court stadium that was nonetheless blotched with sections of a couple of hundred empty seats each.
Fans aren't the only ones who were frustrated. On Saturday afternoon, Indian tennis player Mahesh Bhupathi tweeted: 'Been trying for 6 hours now to buy my wife a ticket to watch me play tomorrow. Still no luck, and the grounds here feel empty. ABSURD!!!'
At Sunday morning's Olympic press briefing, a British reporter brandished a digital photo of empty seats at a men's gymnastics event and asked London Games chair Sebastian Coe to identify the guilty absentees. Mr. Coe replied: 'I'm very happy to look at your holiday snaps later.'
Mr. Coe then expounded by saying that it was early in the Games, that empty seats weren't new to the Olympics and that, in fact, the venues were 'stuffed to the gullets.'
Mr. Coe asserted that empty seats were 'not going to be an issue through these Games' and said organizers were distributing spare tickets to the military, students and teachers. 'Those venues are humming,' he said.
By Sunday evening, the controversy yielded a parody Twitter account called 'the Empty Seat' (@olympicseat), in which the vacant chair laments: 'My grandfather was a seat in the 1948 Olympics. He made it sound so grand. I wanted to follow in his footsteps.'
A spokesman for Locog, as the London Olympics organizing committee is known, said Saturday: 'We are aware that some venues have empty seats this morning. We believe the empty seats are in accredited seating areas, and we are in the process of finding out who should have been in the seats and why they weren't there.'
Locog said it is working to find a way to quickly repurpose unused seats. By Sunday, military members and their families were being offered empty seats at events such as gymnastics.
Locog has a total inventory of about 8.8 million tickets for the Games, but only about 75% of them wind up on sale to the public. About 12% go to national Olympic committees, who then can sell to customers in their countries. About 8% go to sponsors, rights holders and others. The last 5% go to international federations, the International Olympic Committee and sellers of various travel packages.
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