We’ve sat through the years of Olympics-related construction. The only information session we were given about the Olympics happened months before anyone on campus started to care. And since then, communications from the university informing us about the Games have been essentially non-existent.

But hey, the Olympics are finally here, that means we’ll finally get our payoff, right? All our inconvenience will be rewarded with a giant celebration? Isn’t that how it works? Well, only if you went out and paid for your own tickets, because it seems like UBC would rather you didn’t attend.
The university purchased 442 Olympic tickets at $40,690. There’s nothing wrong with an organization purchasing a mass amount of tickets, as long as the various stakeholders in it see the benefits. But UBC has allocated only 82 tickets to be given away to students. Alumni have gotten 118. Former students have received more tickets than current students.

BCIT and SFU also purchased Olympic tickets, which they raffled away to their students, staff and faculty. Unlike at UBC, none of these were given to administration, former students or stakeholders. Students are feeling the impacts of the Games more than any other university students in the Lower Mainland—we’ve already seen road closures and fields paved over—yet we’re the least likely to get into the Games?

Imagine if your landlord decided to throw a party in a house you were leasing and not only took forever to tell you the details of when it was happening or what to bring, but made it clear that you weren’t invited. Worse, imagine you were handed a mop to clean up after the party, then found out all of the house’s former tenants and your friends were invited.

Most of those few tickets that were given out to students were not made common knowledge. The VP Students office just sent out a mass e-mail survey to all students with the chance to win Olympic and Paralympic tickets, but it seems a little late at this point, doesn’t it? The only other tickets that were given out to students were the ones given to Associate Director, Student Development Chad Hyson  and Student Olympic Collaborative (SOC), a student group at UBC which promotes the Olympics, who distributed them as they saw fit.

The SOC was partly responsible for setting up raffles and draws to disseminate the tickets. They held a raffle at the Student Leadership Conference, a photo contest and a contest through a UBC Housing survey, to name a few. They also plan to give away some tickets during the Torch Relay. But the only way you would know about any of those is if you were following the SOC or going to the events they were working on. Unsurprisingly, barely any students we asked knew that dozens of tickets were being given away to students. Not that this is atypical for the SOC—try finding out any details about their Olympic Torch Relay. It’s less than a week away and they still haven’t announced the main entertainment or even nailed down the event’s time. There will be a “flash mob” that is about as spontaneous as tax season, though.

At this point, it’s too late for UBC to do very much more for us when it comes to the Games. Students have already planned out their reading break; they’re going to the celebrations, leaving town, or watching the events. The time for the campus to do much celebrating around a once in a lifetime event has come and gone, and that’s sad. This is a campus whose biggest failing is a continual lack of student engagement, and if you want an example of how, this Olympics tickets fiasco is front and centre.

We’re not saying that UBC intended to leave students out of the loop when they were planning for the Games. More than anything, it seems like they forgot we even exist.

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