As someone said above, each country or region gets allocated a certain number of tickets for each event, and then a designated private party has a lottery to sell them. In the US that private party is CoSport. So certainly it would be harder to get tickets if you are in Japan, where there's no travel, than if you are in, say, Ecuador. The US falls in the middle, as it is a wealthy country and lots of people might be interested in going to the Olympics, but there are limiting factors, like cost, travel time and language. I've been to the Vancouver and London Olympics before and tickets were pretty hard to get for Americans...I didn't get any "big end" events. I did get one afternoon of T&F (called "Athletics" by the Olympics) in London, but not for any finals of premier events. We went into the lottery this year expecting trouble getting good tickets but actually got almost everything we asked for. We have T&F on the day of the women's 5K final and we also got the women's gold medal soccer (along with some less popular events like fencing and velodrome cycling). We asked for B tickets (the second most expensive) for each. The T&F tickets were the most expensive at $611 each for that day at the B level. No the hard part, which is matching up housing with the days that you have tickets for.... For whoever couldn't get marathons stadium tickets, I'm sure that there re still some available in some place like the allocation given to Ecuador or something. I have no idea how you would go about getting someone to purchase for you though.