The gymnasts who will compete for Team USA at the Tokyo Olympics are still five months from trying out for the team. But Americans who want to watch them in person at the Olympics might already be out of luck.
The 2020 Games, which officially open July 24, already may be the toughest Olympics ticket in decades, and possibly ever, ticket sellers say.
U.S.-market tickets for the opening and closing ceremonies, swimming, gymnastics, and track and field sold out within about three hours of their release in June, July and October, said Michael Clyne, spokesman for CoSport, the official ticketer for the U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Committee. A new batch of tickets will become available at 3 p.m. ET Thursday on CoSport’s website and is expected to see similarly high demand.
After recent Olympics in Russia, South Korea and Brazil showed less interest from consumers, Tokyo Games tickets are scarcer even than those for the wildly popular 2012 London Olympics.
Speaking of demand in the U.S. ticket market, Clyne said, “I can confirm not only that the Tokyo 2020 ticket lottery registered the highest numbers to date, but that it was 54% higher than London’s numbers.” CoSport has sold Olympics tickets in the U.S. for more than two decades.
CoSport had sold out of most Tokyo 2020 single tickets for the U.S. market, and before the news of Thursday’s release it was offering mainly packages that include hotel or entertainment elements.
As of Wednesday, Tokyo 2020 had sold 4.48 million Olympic tickets to residents of Japan. That’s more than half of the 7.8 million total that the organizing committee estimates it will have available to sell.
At previous Games, about 70% of tickets went to the host-country population. A spokesman for Japan’s organizing committee said it couldn’t say at this stage what Tokyo’s percentage will be. But if tradition holds, it would leave roughly 2.3 million tickets to be sold to the more than 200 other countries that participate in the Olympics.
Even with the Olympics more than six months off, it’s clear that demand for popular events has overwhelmed supply. In the first ticket lottery in Japan last May, prospective buyers made 56.77 million requests for tickets. Just 3.22 million tickets were sold.
Several forces have driven demand. The greater Tokyo area’s population of about 38 million is nearly three times the size of 2016 Olympics host city Rio de Janeiro.
Tokyo Olympic venues are relatively small in size, due in part to the organizing committee’s focus on not overbuilding and a push to repurpose venues from the 1964 Tokyo Games.
Tokyo’s Olympic Stadium, which will hold track and field and the opening and closing ceremonies, has a capacity of 68,000—12,000 smaller than London 2012’s equivalent. The temporary Ariake Gymnastics Centre will hold 12,000 for the popular Olympic sport—8,000 fewer than London’s gymnastics venue. Tokyo’s swimming venue holds 2,500 fewer than London’s did.
National pride also is spurring Japanese fans to fill seats and driving the sale of domestic Olympic sponsorships, which typically come with ticket allotments or the right to purchase tickets. The London Games had 42 domestic partnerships of all kinds, including official suppliers. At the latest count, Tokyo 2020 had 66 domestic partners.
Sometime this spring, overseas residents will be able to buy tickets directly via the Tokyo 2020 website, a spokesman said, but it’s not clear how many tickets might actually be left.
There are two events that enterprising fans can watch without a ticket: the men’s and women’s Olympic marathons. Because of concerns about heat in Tokyo in August, those races were relocated to a public park in Sapporo, more than 500 miles to the north.
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Write to Rachel Bachman at rachel.bachman@wsj.com
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