What Are the Typical Prices For Tickets to a Winter Olympics Event?

Tickets to Winter Olympic events are difficult to get a hold of; they take place only once every four years and feature some of the very best athletes from every corner of the world competing against each other in one venue. The rarity of this type of competition, coupled with the tremendous of athleticism and intense competition that is likely to take place makes the tickets a bit more expensive than a sporting event or show that is more commonplace.

Even under the blanket of the Olympics, individual competitions or games in the same sport, conducted on the same day can vary drastically in price depending on quite a few factors. Here is a quick breakdown of some of the more popular Winter Olympic Events and how they will differ in cost at the 2010 games.

The Popularity of the Individual Event

This has a lot to do with the cost of tickets to each of the events. The most popular Winter Olympic events are ice hockey and figure skating, so it's no coincidence and should come as no surprise that these two events have, by far, the most expensive tickets. Ski jumping and speed skating are also very popular and have higher priced seating than many of the other events, but the prices of tickets to these events pales in comparison to the tickets for hockey and figure skating.

Sports like cross country skiing and curling still can draw large crowds but comparatively, they aren't nearly as popular as some of the other Winter Olympic events. Fewer people know of the athletes that compete in these games and there isn't a great deal of action to keep the audience on the edge of their seats so ticket prices to these events are among the cheapest that you can find for a Winter Olympic event. You could conceivably be able to get tickets to a qualifying round of either of these events for between twenty-five and forty dollars and you could get into even the gold medal round for fewer than one hundred dollars.

What's on the Line

This is where the greatest disparity between ticket prices at Winter Olympic Games events occurs. Preliminary rounds of any event are far less expensive than the elimination rounds and elimination rounds are far less expensive than the medal rounds. Tickets in the Gold medal round of some sports can net more than ten times more than tickets in the prelims for the same sport.

Here's a quick look at some of the biggest differences in ticket prices between the first day of an event and the medal round.

The price for the cheapest seats to a 2010 game in the first round of women's ice hockey is just twenty-five dollars, in the men's ice hockey first round the cheap seats are around fifty dollars. The price of a high end ticket to the Gold medal game of men's ice hockey is the most expensive at the 2010 games a whopping $775.00. This is the most drastic comparison, but some others do have a pretty big difference as well figure skating prelim tickets can be had for fifty dollars, but a ticket in the medal round can be upwards of $525.00.

Most of the other events don't have quite as drastic a difference even between preliminary rounds and medal rounds. Tickets to snowboarding will cost you between fifty and $150.00, speed skating tickets for 2010 will be anywhere between ninety-five dollars and $185.00 and Luge tickets will cost their viewers between thirty and eighty-five dollars.

As you can see, there aren't really any typical prices for Olympic event tickets, but if you don't have a great deal of money to spend you might want to opt for preliminary or early rounds of the events that you want to see, because as the days of the Games go on and as each event begins to mean more the cost of the tickets begins to rise dramatically.