And this is only the first week of ticket applications.
On March 31, the Olympic committee for Rio de Janeiro’s 2016 Games launched the first round of ticket applications—and Brazilian residents responded in full. Some 1.2 million people applied for tickets in the first week of the first round. Let’s take a minute to put that massive first draw count into perspective:
1.2 million is…
• The amount of people you can fit into 12 Magic Kingdoms at Walt Disney World.
• The number of miles you would travel if you took 48 trips around the Earth’s circumference.
• More people than live in Rhode Island (1.055 million).
• More than twice the number of people that live in Wyoming (584,153).
• The number of steps you would walk in 702 trips up the Eiffel Tower.
• Four days’ worth of pedestrian traffic through New York City’s Time Square.
• More than 9,375 Boeing 737s filled to capacity.
While that number hardly approaches the amount of tickets available—the committee has plans to sell 7.5 million tickets, and 70 percent of those are reserved for Brazilian residents—it’s quite a lot considering there are still several weeks left to enter the first-round lottery. Of course, there’s also the second-round lottery (to take place in July) and the chaos that will inevitably ensue when ticket sales open up to the rest of the world in October.
In other words: better start planning now—with more than half of the tickets being priced around $22 or less, there’s going to be a lot of figurative elbow-jabbing to get nab a seat at the Games.
