Empty Seats Plague #Sochi Olympics

Check out the picture for the men's slopestyle final. The bleachers are half-full, wtf? That was a cool event. Something else must be going on.

At WSJ, "2014 Sochi Olympics: So Far, Empty Seats Abound: It's Early, But Attendance Suggests Modest Ticket Demand":

SOCHI, Russia—Inhospitable hotels were the big headache of the 2014 Sochi Olympics preshow. After the first day of full competition, it looks like empty seats could become the problem child of the Games themselves.

A few events played to virtual sellout crowds and enthusiastic spectators: notably biathlon, the ski-and-shoot Russian favorite, and team figure skating, in which the home squad held a commanding lead.

But other venues in both the Olympic Park and the so-called "mountain cluster" high above Sochi were plagued by sometimes large swaths of empty seats. And there were a lot of echoes in the empty corners of the arenas for events such as women's hockey and speedskating. Even one of the Games' hippest events, the action-sports event known as slopestyle snowboarding, appeared to have hundreds of empty seats, even though organizers declared it a sellout in the 6,250-seat Rosa Khutor Exreme Park.

The women's hockey crowd of 4,136 for the U.S.-Finland game on Saturday was roughly 60% capacity, and 4,386 watched Canada beat Switzerland. Shayba Arena, the smaller of Sochi's two hockey venues, has a capacity of 7,000.

Some of the lackluster attendance has come during preliminary competitions, which many fans, sponsors and even members of national sporting federations prefer to skip. On the opening day of the 2012 London Olympics, televised images of empty seats at popular events such as gymnastics led thousands of ravenous British sports fans—frustrated for more than a year in their quest for tickets—to complain bitterly to London's Olympic organizers. Those officials later reclaimed some tickets that were going unused by sporting federations and sponsors and sold them to the public.

Sochi organizers said this week that about 80% of their ticket inventory had been sold by the end of January. The organizers wouldn't say how many total tickets they have on offer. But plenty are available.

Based on visits to all the major venues and dozens of interviews on Saturday, the problem in Sochi seems to be more a function of soft demand. The long-track speedskating venue, Adler Arena, offered one of Saturday's marquee events: the men's 5,000-meter race. Yet even at its peak, the crowd never seemed to fill more than three-quarters of the 8,000 seats. Organizers didn't release an attendance figure. In the past, speedskating has been one of the Games' toughest tickets because the venues tend to be small.

At the moguls venue in the mountains on Saturday night, officials put the crowd at about 3,000—well short of the listed capacity of 4,500. Russian fans who are attending are both enthusiastic and opportunistic.

Vartan Oksuzyan, an engineer at a primatology institute in nearby Adler, was at figure skating Saturday night with tickets he purchased in November. He was accompanied by his 18-year-old daughter, Susana, who had her cheeks painted with a Russian flag on the left and a white figure skate on the right. "We're cheering for everyone," he said—the Canadians because a cousin who lives there asked them to, and the Americans at the request of a former teacher of his who now lives in Minneapolis.

Well, maybe the terrorists are keeping people away.

More here.