Truth or fiction: GST say they sold 27,514 tickets in Kingston over the 3 days - more than double every new and emerging sport

Fiction.

If they sold 27,000 tickets, they certainly didn't show up in the stands. Nowhere close. I mean not even remotely close.

But hey, the promoter's job is to promote. That's their job. It kind of reminds me when Alexis Ohanian acted like Athlos streaming ratings were somehow higher than the WNBA tv ratings with Caitlin Clark.

The stadium where the Kingston meet was held has a seating capacity of 35,000, so ~9,000 spectators would mean the stadium was a little over 25% full.

For the first night, this video of the men's 100m race gives a good idea. It has shots of the crowd from multiple sides and angles from 2:30-3:15 in the video.

They should have had enough clarity to close off the stands other than the home stretch, and put tarped advertisements or similar over the soon-to-be-empty seats. That may be expensive but it's less costly than a terrible first impression.

The article was fine. MJ said they didn't do everything right which I like.

But the claim of selling 27,000 tickets seems laughable to me unless it's common for people in Jamaica to buy tickets and not come to an event.

They gave away tickets on Day 2 and Day 3. Day 2 seemed to have a bigger crowd but no way was it half full. To get to 27,000 you'd have to have 13,000 on day 2. 7,000 on Day 1 and Day 3. Don't think that happened.

But that's part of the problem with having it in a 35,000 seat stadium. The visuals will look terrible if its not full or tarped off and they decided to let that happen.

But that's all in the past. This week it says they've sold half the tickets already and it seats 5,000 so that's 2,500 a day x 3 = 7,500. If they sell out, that would be 15,000 people which I don't think Kingston got if I had to bet.

My take would be don't try and spin attendance as a positive. They missed the mark big time in Jamaica. Acknowledge and move on. We said going into this "I don't see how they fill up a stadium like that"

But it doesn't really matter. Have better visuals for this. Penn they need to buy a tarp and LA if they have more star power and a 10,000 seat arena hopefully they end on a bang.

LA's the week before Pre so picking up some top European stars or Nike stars in the states shouldn't be as hard even if a lot of athletes don't like the double.

But Chebet can pick up an easy $100k.

Lol. A good high school meet sells more than 2500 tickets. Ever been to Arcadia or the California state meet?

Yes.

Does it really matter as a spectator? NO

I'll be at the meet tomorrow I guarantee I won't be there to look at the crowd.

Nike Beaverton, Track Town USA, Runnerspace, Dyestat, and Citius Magazine was caught exaggerating by the power company, tax collector, gasoline disributors, police survey aircraft, National Park Service aerial flights, sewage monitors, etc.

I mean coming out of the mouth of Steve Gera is this surprising? This is all guys like him do - it's no different to any politician getting up there and just straight up embellishing anything they want to. He could be talking entry tickets + parking passes for all we know. But it's this sort of delusional BS that ultimately sinks entities who foolishly put their trust in "sport executive" purveyors of fine snake oil like him.

And think about it this way - if they sold 27k tickets, at least 10k of those tickets clearly didn't bother showing up to see through their purchase - that's probably even worse than people not buying tickets at all.

I'm so interested to hear how they react to the crowd in Miami - if they delight in "selling out" a 3000 seat senior citizens community athletic facility. I can already see the "sold out jam packed stadium in Miami, Florida..." press release.

The sooner GST truly gets real with their situation the better it's going to be for them if this really is going to be more than a 2 year thing (right now I feel like irrespective of the "3 year" signings they aren't getting more strikes at bat than the second year).

Working in government, I know a little bit about BS and spin.

I would strongly suspect that some amount of the 27,000 tickets "sold" were allocated to giveaways. While there may have been some exchange of money (probably discounted), these are then given away for free (which we know was happening in Kingston).

With the government of Jamaica as a sponsor it is very likely that they "bought" a certain amount of tickets with the intention of distribution to local schoolchildren, sports groups, government staff etc. So you end up with a higher number "sold" than actually attending. Sponsors do this all the time in sports and arts events.

This is part of why at any pro sports game they announce the attendance during the game, based on tickets scanned in, a.k.a. butts in seats, not how many were sold.

I mean that's not unreasonable.

The energy in a packed 3000-seater will be much better than a mostly-empty soccer stadium, and 3000 people out for pro track is pretty darn good in North America.