Sluggish beginning to Olympic ticket sales
With five months to go before the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics open, the Games are barely an afterthought for most South Koreans, with slow local ticket sales amid the biggest political scandal in years and a torrent of North Korean weapons tests.
South Korea wants more than a million spectators for the Games, which start in February, and expects 70 percent to be locals. But if South Koreans are excited about the Games, they didn’t show it during the first phase of ticket sales between February and June — the 52,000 tickets purchased by locals during the period were less than 7 percent of the 750,000 seats organizers aim to sell domestically.
International sales got off to a faster start, with more than half of the targeted 320,000 seats sold. Now, though, there’s fear that an increasingly belligerent North Korea, which has tested two ICBMs and its strongest ever nuclear bomb in recent weeks, might keep foreign fans away from Pyeongchang, a ski-resort town about 50 miles south of the world’s most heavily armed border.
South Korean Olympic organizers reopened online ticket sales last Tuesday and hope for a late surge in domestic ticket sales as the Games draw closer. Locals purchased nearly 17,000 tickets on the first two days of resumed sales.
ELSEWHERE 4 losses, 0 goals, 1 fired soccer coach
Frank de Boer was fired by Crystal Palace only four games into the Premier League season.
Hours after Palace Chairman Steve Parish called for “some sense” regarding the speculation surrounding De Boer’s position, the club’s board decided to end the Dutchman’s 77-day stint.
The London club lost all four of its league matches under De Boer, without scoring a goal. The last team to make such a start in England’s top flight was Preston in 1924.
In terms of games played, De Boer’s tenure is the shortest of any permanent manager in Premier League history.
U.S. national-team forward Jordan Morris could miss the final round of World Cup qualifiers in October against Panama, and Trinidad and Tobago because of a hamstring injury suffered Sunday during a Major League Soccer game.
Morris, a Stanford alum who plays for the Seattle Sounders, underwent an MRI exam Monday.
“The question is how bad it is and what the timeline is to get him back,” Seattle coach Brian Schmetzer said. “But we’ll do everything humanly possible to get him back as soon as we can.” Doping: Three Russian cyclists are suing the World Anti-Doping Agency and the Canadian lawyer who led the recent investigation into Russian doping allegations.
The cyclists contend that Montreal-based WADA and Western University law professor Richard McLaren “unfairly implicated them.” Kirill Sveshnikov, Dmitry Strakhov and Dmitry Sokolov call the investigation “rushed and compromised.”
The cyclists say they were banned from the Rio Olympics as a result of the McLaren Report and suffered “great reputational harm.” All three unsuccessfully appealed to the Court of Arbitration for Sport before the Olympics.