Thousands of people queued overnight and swiftly purchased the final 250,000 Olympic tickets for events in Beijing during next month's Summer Games, reported the DPA. Local residents and many from outside Beijing flocked to the "Bird's Nest" National Stadium and other venues selling tickets, with some people reportedly camping out since Wednesday evening. Some of the more than 30,000 people queuing at one ticket kiosk became "overexcited," forcing local police to take extra crowd control measures to prevent problems, said Zhu Jing of the Beijing organizing committee (BOCOG). State media said the ticket buyers at the kiosk in Beitucheng West Road, in the north of Beijing, "became impatient due to the hot weather and the long wait". Zhu said police set up lines to maintain order and detained a reporter from the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post who clashed with officers after "refusing to heed police orders." The official Xinhua news agency quoted city officials as saying the reporter was detained after "breaking through a barricade... and kicking a police officer in the groin." The South China Morning Post did not report the detention of any of its staff but quoted members of a crew for Hong Kong-based Now Broadband TV as saying they were detained by police and asked to erase video of a brawl outside a ticket kiosk. Hundreds people were still queuing mid-morning outside another ticket office at the Worker's Stadium, which is to host Olympic football matches. Remaining tickets for gymnastics, diving, the modern pentathlon, mountain biking, badminton, kayaking and several other other events sold out in the first few hours. Another 570,000 tickets are on offer for football matches in the cities of Tianjin, Shanghai, Shenyang and Qinhuangdao, organizers said. Yao Haiya, a 25-year-old woman from the southern city of Ningbo, told the official China Daily that she had bought a tent to camp out in the queue at the Bird's Nest since Wednesday. "When I got here at 10 pm, there were already hundreds of people ahead of me," Yao told the newspaper. Yao said she wanted to buy two tickets to see Liu Xiang, the 110-metre hurdles gold medallist from 2004, compete in the stadium. "This is a once-in-a-lifetime chance to see the Olympics, and I can't afford to miss it," she was quoted as saying. Tickets for popular Olympic events are reportedly changing hands for several times their face value. The Beijing Times last week reported that one ticket for the opening ceremony with a face value of 5,000 yuan (730 dollars), was sold for 210,000 yuan. Some 7 million tickets have been sold for the August 8-24 Games, about 40 per cent of them in China. They were bringing in an expected 140 million dollars in revenue. About 2 million more tickets were designated for the International Olympic Committee, sponsors, dignitaries and broadcasters. Ticket prices for the events in 28 sports categories range from 30 yuan to 1,000 yuan. To make the tickets affordable for ordinary Chinese, the price for 58 per cent of the seats was set at 100 yuan or lower. Fourteen per cent of the tickets were reserved for students at a price of 10 yuan or less.
