Thinking Paper #188: An open letter to Seb Coe‏

By Ron Ford Golightly

Dear Seb Coe,

We would like to start by saying that the IIPBA highly commends a number of your achievements to date: becoming an Olympic champion; teaching William Hague “judo”; and bringing the Olympics to London in 2012.

But, to cut to the chase, when you said that the Olympics would be for the ordinary Londonder, what exactly did you mean? Now, the IIPBA patiently went along with the patently flawed ballot system for tickets, and duly moaned over its tea break with colleagues and co-workers when all it managed to secure were two £20 tickets to see the 2nd round of the women’s Greco wrestling.

More recently however, now that this public “anger” has subsided, the IIPBA can’t help but notice the number of adverts springing up across the capital attempting to get us excited about winning Olympic tickets through corporate competitions from people like EDF, Virgin and PetsRus.

That’s right, the tickets designated for “Londoners” are now being sold back to us via competitions parading as altruistic corporate gestures. Competitions which require “Londoners” to sign up to being ripped off by a French utility company before even being within a whiskers chance of getting to watch Rebecca Adlington’s shoulders carve through chlorine.

You've betrayed us Seb

All the best,

The IIPBA

P.s. we still have vacancies on our board of trustees if you are interested.