New tickets were sporadically added after the 4th official first-come-first-served public sales started in early February, but the biggest ticket drop after the general release in July last year has occurred on Friday, March 6th!
On website of CoSport, the Authorized Ticket Reseller in the United States, there are still a lot of tickets left even after filtering by “Exclude Sold Out”!
Badminton, baseball, softball, judo, rugby, table tennis, etc.
Surprisingly tickets were available for Decathlon competitions and Taekwondo, which had been pretty competitive to find tickets.
What surprised me the most is not just the large number of competitions, but also the fact that tickets are on sale for many sports that are not so often listed up on the page.
For example, I have probably never seen badminton women’s singles on sale before. Doubles final is for sale as well.
And most sessions for Judo finals are on sale!
Tickets are naturally expensive for sessions where Japanese players are expected to compete for medals. Moreover, grade A seats are only available. Each badminton and judo match costs as much as $500~$600! I am not so interested in the competitions that I feel it is too expensive.
So I do not buy any of them.
From schedule wise, I probably could make Badminton though.
And here comes Basketball Men’s final!
From the Tickets Site Tracker, which sends an alert email automatically when new tickets are added to the CoSport website, I received the above notification, but by the time I actually access the site, tickets are already sold out. . Probably the number of sales is very limited, and there are so many people who want the tickets.
The men’s basketball final has much higher demand than 100M final, even considering the fact the venue is much smaller. The NBA US Dream Team is at closest position to gold medal this time as well. If you really want to see a Dream Team’s game, you would buy tickets for final match. You will never know when the Dream Team plays in qualifying round where the match-up schedule is not clear yet.
Golf!
What I wanted for last half year are tickets for first day of men’s golf, which is still a big missing piece for me.
And finally!
Not only for the day 1, tickets are available for all days except first round of Women’s. Given my struggle for last several months, I had a bit mixed feeling, but I just go and get ones!
Now I have purchased tickets for all four days for men’s golf and all four days for women’s golf! It was July 24th last year when I first got a ticket for men and women, so it took more than half a year to complete purchase for the 8 sessions …
A little problem of golf competition is, however, it takes each player about 4 hours to complete his/her individual round of play, and for each day it takes more than 8 hours from the start to the end of competition. Considering round-trip time to and from the golf course, it is a bit annoying that I can not add other competitions during the day.
The outdoor summer heat will be excessive, and there are probably 25,000 spectators to attend the event each day, so I will be unlikely able to closely watch popular golfers playing. Spectators’ back heads will be only in my sight when last group has reached the green of 18th hole on the final day.
Do I still wanna go? Well, yes I gotta go.
My to date
Tickets for many popular sessions were for sale, but I only purchased ones for Men’s golf day 1:
| JUN | Lottery sale | None | 0 |
| JUL | Live sale | Equestrian | 1 |
| Extra live sale | Basketball, 3on3, Handball (x2), Hockey, Weight lifting | 6 | |
| Extra extra live sale | Golf (x4), Weightlifting | 5 | |
| OCT | 2nd live sale | None | 0 |
| Extra live sale | Golf, Volleyball (x2), Handball, Wrestling | 5 | |
| NOV | Extra extra live sale | Water polo, Soccer | 2 |
| Extra live sale again | Did not purchase | 0 | |
| Extra live sale continues | Soccer | 1 | |
| DEC | Extra sale – End of year | Artistic Swimming | 1 |
| JAN | Extra sale – New year | Golf (x2) | 2 |
| 3rd live sale | Baseball | 1 | |
| FEB | 4th live sale | Did not purchase | 0 |
| MAR | Covid-19ish live sale | Golf | 1 |
I got tickets for 11 sessions , 13 events and 25 sessions !
Ticket prices are relatively high for popular sessions where Japanese players are likely to win medals, and my schedule is already tight. But I would like to continue to look for tickets of softball qualifying sessions to happen in my hometown Fukushima. The problem is, from what I’ve received from the Tickets Site Tracker alert so far, it seems that the tickets were never on sale in the United States. Therefore, possibly tickets are only available to people in Japan or just to people affected by Tsunami and nuclear disaster? My guess would be probably right.
Anyways, a large amount of tickets got dropped at this timing.
I wonder why it happened on March 6 when the Covid-19 started to explode in the United States, and in fact a lot of tickets are still unsold even after two days.
Being a bit optimistic here, the reason would be most of the unsold tickets are expensive because they are for category category A seats, and it has already been more than half a year since the general sale started, and probably tickets seekers have already bought all they wanted. That would be why people are no longer acting quickly.
Being a bit pessimistic, I hope we will not put ourselves into a situation where we will wait for a while while staying in Tokyo due to the fear of virus infection and the risk of postponement / discontinuation of the Olympic Games.
