OLYMPICS ticket applicants have been posted an elliptic set of messages that will eventually reveal what sport they will be watching.
As entirely random amounts of money were taken from bank accounts, the person behind the clues for Ted Rogers’ 3-2-1 was brought out of retirement, along with an army of cryptic crossword compilers, to write the receipts.
Baffled Carlisle purchaser, Wayne Hayes, said: “I got a slip confirming I’d paid £385 and a scroll of parchment saying ‘What walks on the earth but cannot see sky? Its eyes number 20, but has just six thighs’.
“There was also a train ticket to Knutsford and a false moustache.
“Am I going to the rowing, the opening ceremony or the official firing of Seb Coe? For all I know I may even be competing in the bloody thing.”
The next stage will be a series of adverts directed by David Lynch and Darren Aronofsky featuring dream sequences and mathematical equations that will, according to organisers, ‘spark image clouds in the collective unconsciousness of the public which will gradually reveal to them whether they managed to get to see any athletics or not’.
The ticket lottery method is being adopted by other companies including Ryanair, whose chief executive Michael O’Leary was drawn to the arbitrary and completely unfair aspects of the process.
A spokesman said: “From next April a customer who wants to go to Alicante could find they have actually bought 200kg of freight space in a flight to Uzbekistan.”
But the process was criticised by Olympologist, Tom Logan, who said: “In China everybody knew seven years in advance what event they’d be going to see and how many times they would be required to clap their hands together.
“The only thing we’ve got right is telling Boris Johnson to piss up a rope.”
