Tickets for Greco-Roman wrestling have gone quicker than a Take That concert. Taekwondo is a sell-out. Yet still they cannot shift tickets for our national sport.
We have woken at 6am to buy seats for women’s basketball preliminaries, but are so unmoved by football at the 2012 Olympics that 1.5 million tickets are still without takers.
There is only one answer, one man who can confront a crisis such as this. How long before we unveil the not-so-secret weapon? How long before the call goes in to Hollywood?
How long before the darling of English football is summoned, even at 37? Becks to the rescue for one last blast.
The more Olympic football is dogged with problems, the more it seems inevitable that David Beckham will be required to revive an exercise notable so far only for negativity.
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Is it the right thing to do? My colleague Patrick Barclay has described the prospect of such a swansong as “an insult to Olympic football, which has become an extremely valuable preparation for aspirants to future World Cups and should have no place for relics of past tournaments”.
But then if we are going to grant the tournament that degree of developmental significance, what is the point of over-age players being in the Olympics at all?
From the blank looks yesterday, that is the sort of question that people have long stopped asking.
It goes without saying that the over-age rule is a contrivance and, in short, a fudge born of tensions between the International Olympic Committee, which wants as much big-name glamour as it can squeeze into the Olympic Village, and Fifa, which does not want its World Cup threatened by a star-studded Games.
It is the result of political to and fro that has already resulted in the format being altered several times since 1984 when professionals were first allowed to play at the Games.
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In 1984 and 1988, players from Europe and South America were eligible only if they had not taken part in World Cup qualifiers and finals. From 1992 onwards, the tournament has been an under-23 World Cup (an event that Fifa does not have), plus the three over-age players to provide a little added attraction for paying punters and broadcasters.
These random eligibility rules do not mean the tournament is incapable of offering football worth watching from players en route to great careers. Ronaldo, Roberto Carlos, Xavi Hernández, Lionel Messi, Samuel Eto’o and Carlos Tévez have played at the Olympics and may have benefited from it.
But this anomaly may just be one of the reasons why the British are struggling to get their heads around the point of it all. We have no recent history of competing in Olympic football, and no firm details yet on where Team GB will be playing (except that it is expected to be Old Trafford and the Millennium Stadium as well as Wembley in the group stage in an attempt to prove that the Games are not just for Londoners).
Is it about winning the tournament (in which case Team GB’s games should surely all have been at Wembley), developing the next generation or putting bums on seats?
That depends on who you speak to and, as reported in this paper on Saturday, that tension is now creeping into the issue of who should coach Team GB. It is a decision for the FA chairman and his board, but their likely choice, Stuart Pearce, is leaving the BOA and Locog — the London 2012 organising committee — entirely underwhelmed as they try to generate nationwide enthusiasm.
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They want a big name to sell tickets, a Harry Redknapp, Martin O’Neill or Sir Alex Ferguson, but it is easy to throw these names around and far harder to work out how they might accept such a challenge given that it will take a month out of pre-season if they are at clubs.
Pity the FA, which has been given the thankless task of putting together a British team and has so far created only a political storm with the other home nations, who are trying to block their players, and a head coach who is leaving everyone cold. The FA does all the spadework and for what exactly? Only to see us lose to Switzerland, or another “lowly” nation, and be left carrying the can?
With this troubled birth, no wonder the figure of Beckham looms ever larger, his selection fast feeling like an inevitability whoever is running the team, particularly given that none of the England players who go to Euro 2012 will be eligible.
And once his contract with the Los Angeles Galaxy ends this year, there is a chance that England’s most capped outfield player could try to return to club football here just to prove that he still has something to offer so close to retirement.
If it is a question of whipping up interest in a B-list tournament, there is no one better. As for insulting the next generation, let them first prove that they are better than the old fellow at a 50-yard pass.