Senior IOC Official Arrested on Charges he Participated in Olympic Ticket Scam

While Brazilian authorities are still sorting out whether certain crimes have actually been committed, they’re moving more definitively on others — as they arrested a top European Olympic official Wednesday on charges of participating in a ticket scam.

According to a report from ESPN Brazil, Patrick Hickey — a senior member of the International Olympic Committee’s Executive Committee — is alleged to have secured Olympic tickets for brokers who then tried to sell them on the black market at significantly higher prices.

The BBC says that when authorities went to Hickey’s room to make the arrest, Hickey’s wife answered the door and said that the IOC honcho had already returned to his home in Ireland. But police conducted a search and checked on an adjacent room, where Hickey answered the door naked.

The scam could possibly explain where there have been so many empty seats at Olympic events. The CBC reports that, to date, Olympic officials have offered such feeble explanations as “people leave…to get food” for all the empty seats. But that would hardly explain photos like these below, taken, in some cases, at marquee events like track and field.

empty seats at Olympic track just eek pic.twitter.com/8nldIq1doc

— Jason Gay (@jasongay) August 17, 2016

Empty seats at #Rio2016 a bad look for NBC https://t.co/aUDsO853S3 via @Sherman_Report pic.twitter.com/ZpzdTSM1I1

— ChicagoSports (@ChicagoSports) August 16, 2016

Sadly, vastly more empty seats than full ones at olympic stadium. A few mins before competition starts. So quiet pic.twitter.com/rfCUWrB8bu

— Adrienne Arsenault (@adriearsenault) August 16, 2016

[image via screengrab]

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