My Road to Rio: The Olympic Events

In Rio last month, I was fortunate enough to have scored tickets to the placing, semi-final, and final matches of the Rugby Sevens and the Round of 16 in beach volleyball. And once my brother and I arrived in Rio and decided we wanted to see another Olympic match, we ended up getting tickets to see Bandminton. The cheapest tickets for any event was roughly $22. This was about the same price as the tickets that I scored during the London Olympics as well. Really, if you can commit to going and find a decent flight deal and decently priced accommodations, attending the Olympic Games can be quite affordable! And I want to share my experience attending these events and exploring Rio here with you. So this is Part 2 of my Olympic post, my spectator experience in Rio.

Getting Around

Once my brother and I were in Rio, we  took the metro/train to Deodoro Stadium to watch Rubgy! We landed early in the morning, took a taxi to our hostel to check in and store our things in a locker, then hopped on the metro. It was a little over $1 each way to get there, but it did take quite a while to get there as well. They closed off the 2 closest metro stations to the stadium for safety reasons, so we had to walk for about 45 minutes and waited through multiple security lines. And I'm sure it didn't help that I accidentally got us on the local train line instead of the express train line that we needed to take when we transferred at the Central Station. Whoops!

For beach volleyball, our hostel was within a few blocks of the arena, so we didn't need to go far on our second day. On our third day in Rio, we needed to go west near the Olympic Village in Tijuca which was a journey. And we could not get there without purchasing these "Olympic travel cards" for R25, which was a total and complete ripoff when it's only R3-4 to get anywhere in the city via transit. This made me extremely frustrated, especially since in London, transit was free if you had tickets to an event for that day. Anyway, to get there, we took the Line 1 train to the end of the line, then transferred onto the brand new Line 4 which was only available to people with Olympic tickets. At the end of that line, we had to take BRT (Bus Rapid Transit) to get to the Olympic venues. And once we were let off, we had to walk about 20 minutes to get to the Riocentro pavilion. This was more of a chore than getting to the Deodoro stadiums. It took over 2 hours, and we were there early. When we were leaving, there was a loooong line to get through security and into the venue. We got lucky to get there when we did. We stayed for only an hour since we had reservations for the tram up to the Cristo Redentor statue in Corcovado, and left an hour before that since google said it was only 40 minutes away when I checked the day before; however, when we finally got a taxi (there was no time to call an Uber), the GPS noted a TON of traffic. We passed a motorcyclist who was hit in the dedicated Olympic fast lanes, sprawled across the two lanes of pavement, on top of just a lot of cars being on the road. It ended up taking an hour and 40 minutes to get to Corcovado, but it still saved us over an hour compared to how long it would have taken on public transit. Plus, it was R100 which amounted to under $30 for that long of a drive. There is nowhere in the Western world that a taxi ride like that would have been so relatively cheap. 

Rugby Sevens

Team USA vs. Spain in the 9th place match

Rugby was on the north side of Rio in the Deodoro Stadium. It was surprisingly empty in the endzone and since there was General Admission seating, we were able to move to the middle section quite easily. For our first ticket, we saw 6 placing matches, including the USA vs. Spain match. It was exciting! In the end we won, of course! And to top it off, we ended up randomly sitting next to the family of one of the US players. He showed up after the match to watch the remaining games with us. I sat next to his dad who was originally from England and got to chat with him through the event. It was a neat experience to be a part of that.

I have never seen a Rugby Sevens match before this. I didn't realize that each half would only be 7 minutes long, with a 2 minute halftime. Basically, rugby is a mix of American football and soccer. The biggest difference from football is that when the person with the ball is tackled, the clock doesn't stop and they have to pass the ball to another team member instead of starting the play over again.

Team GB vs. Fiji in the Gold medal match

I was fortunate enough to snag tickets to the finals in Rugby as well, and there was nothing like watching Fiji beat Great Britain in the Gold medal match. I was rooting for Team GB, but seriously no one was a match for the sheer brute strength behind the Fijian team. Holy cow! At one point, a GB player attempted to tackle a Fijian player but the dude kept running with the GB guy clinging to his leg! And after a few steps, he stopped to kind of kick the poor dude off before running a little further. It was amazing to watch! Plus it was the first Olympic medal for Fiji ever. So cool!

Beach Volleyball

Brazil vs. China

Being from Hawaii, of course we had to watch beach volleyball! What a spectacular venue! This pop-up stadium was built right on Copacabana Beach itself. There were berms along the outside to keep the water from eroding the beach under the stadium and getting into the arena area. I was fortunate to have also watched beach volleyball at the London Olympics in 2012 at the Horse Guards Parade smack dab in the middle of the city, and that was my favorite venue then as it was in Rio this time around. I mean, look at that view! From our seats, we could see the Atlantic Ocean on the left, the classic Copa skyline on the right, and then the game right there in the middle. We also got lucky enough to watch Brazil compete in this match. It's always super fun when you have a chance to watch the host country play. Each ticket allows you to watch one men's match and one women's match. We got to see Qatar vs. Russia in the men's match, which was exciting because there was a guy from Rio on the Qatar team. And for the women's match, we saw Brazil vs. China. The stadium remained relatively empty until halfway through the last set. All of a sudden, all these Brazilians showed up to root for their team. It was a blast! The music and cheers between rallies were mostly local and everyone would sing and cheer and dance along. It was quite an experience!

Badminton

At the last minute, my brother and I decided to stand in the long line at the ticket office just outside of the beach volleyball arena to see if we could see any other events on our third and final day in Rio. We ended up with cheap tickets to watch Badminton. What an interesting Olympic sport! I had never watched competitive badminton before, but it seemed like it could be fun! Our tickets were for matches between 8am and 2pm. We decided to go for a little over an hour in the morning so we could still fit in a visit to the Christ Redeemer statue as well. It was quite a trek to get to the Olympic park where the event was held, but I'm glad we went. It was not what I expected at all. Badminton was held in a convention center! They put up temporary bleacher seating in a convention hall and made 3 courts side by side in the middle. You wouldn't be able to tell from watching it on tv, but they always have 3 games going at the same time. When one match ends, they throw the next team on, regardless of whether it was singles, doubles, men's or women's or mixed. You can see in the picture above that there is a doubles match going on to the right, a singles match in the middle, and another doubles on the left. And the crowd was SO into it! I didn't know badminton could get so intense! We were lucky enough to watch the beginning of a Team USA vs. Germany doubles match as well. Good thing we were wearing our Team USA gear!

Inside the Riocentro convention center

Cristo Redentor


It wouldn't be a trip to Rio without a visit to either the Christ Redeemer statue (Cristo Redentor) or Sugarloaf Mountain. Both sites have great views of the city, but I opted to take my brother to the statue since it was a more recognizable icon of Rio and I wasn't sure if he'd ever make the trip to South America ever again. Of course there were crazy crowds at the top, but I was able to book our entry and tram tickets in advance. When we arrived an hour late for our reservation due to traffic even after taking a taxi ride there, the man in the ticket office just put us on the next tram up, which was nice. The tram ride up to the statue in Corcovado is really neat since it's so steep and you have such amazing views along the way. The wait was a bit longer trying to come down the mountain, but we got lucky again and ended up waiting in line with the entire USA Wrestling team. We chatted some with one of the coaches who noticed our Team USA attire, and we ended up getting free Team USA Olympic Wresting pins!

VIP Lounges and Houses

Another highlight of the Olympics is always the free lounges. Since I went to the London Olympics, I was on the lookout for any fun houses and free events to attend. In London, I went to the Chase Visa VIP Lounge and was able to score free pins, free food and drinks, and even dinner cooked for me by Iron Chef Morimoto. Twice! This time around, Chase did a condensed version of their lounge which only lasted through the first weekend and was only open to Chase MileagePlus card holders, not just Chase Visa card holders like the last time. Luckily our parents have the card and have added us as authorized users, so we got in! And again, there were free pins, free keychains, free hats, free food and drinks (I drank probably 2 liters worth of Schwepps Cirtus!), and free WiFi! We pretty much spent the entire night there that Saturday meeting some new people and watching the US compete in swimming and athletics (track & field) on the big screens they had throughout the lounge.

One of the main features of the lounge was the meet and greet with various Olympians, so I got to meet Summer Sanders who became famous for swimming in the Barcelona Olympics for Team USA. It turns out that she lives in Utah as well and we had a great conversation! Plus she really liked my name! :)

Another highlight was running into my friend, Nick, at the lounge! He flew down for the weekend like I did (see, I'm not the only crazy one!) to watch his cousin compete for Team USA in rowing. It was a pleasant surprise to see a familiar face at the Olympics! It's funny because I became friends with Nick and his friend, Sam, when they were both on my flight to and from Abu Dhabi last May. That trip was also a weekender, which not a lot of people would do. It's always fun to meet like-minded people in the travel world. 

Next Stop Tokyo!

When I got home from Rio, I thought that maybe I was done with the Olympics. I had seen most of what i wanted to see, and unless I could get tickets to watch swimming, I didn't think I was going to go to Toyko. But that all changed when I watched the amazing presentation for Tokyo 2020 at the closing ceremony. I was so excited to see the cute, fun, and high-tech elements in their presentation including watching PM Shinzo Abe as Mario! With Super Mario, Hello Kitty, Pokemon, and Totoro, I just cannot wait to see what Japan does in 2020, especially with their people and their government so on board! So now I can definitely say that I do intend to go to Tokyo in 2020. And I'll be sure to keep you updated on my journey to Tokyo here as well. Who knows...maybe I'll see you there!

My Road to Rio: Getting There

About three weeks before the Olympics began this year, I discovered that all remaining unsold Olympic event tickets had been opened to the public. When I could not obtain any Rugby Sevens tickets through CoSport, the only official authorized ticket reseller for Olympic tickets in the US (read: the only way to get tickets with a US address), I was *finally* able to score tickets to the men's rugby placing matches, including the semi-finals and finals through the Rio 2016 website. This was the main event I wanted to see, and years ago I told myself that if I could get tickets to see the first time Rugby (Sevens) was played in the Olympics, I would go to Rio. So then I had a choice to make. I hadn't been planning to attend the Olympics this time around. I already went to London in 2012, and I really just wanted to see rugby. And now, it was actually possible!

Flights

My brother in the GIG Rio Airport
right after we landed

So with the idea that maybe this could work, I went online to look at flights. There is absolutely no way I would ever have been able to afford a monetary ticket to Rio during the Olympics. Flights were pricing in the thousands! However, the mileage flights were not bad. Of course, this close to the event, there were no saver level redemptions available, but I was able to find an "anytime" economy fare for 55,000 miles each way. And thinking that I didn't want to go to Rio alone again, and not knowing many others who also collect miles like I do, I called my family in Hawaii to invite them to come with me since it was exactly the same price in miles to fly to Rio from Honolulu as it was for me to fly there from Salt Lake City. In the end, after a little convincing, my little brother decided to come with me. He had not been to South America before, and aside from visiting family in Thailand, he had not traveled outside of the US. It definitely depleted my mileage stores, but it was so worth it to use my miles on my family! This was the first time I would be traveling internationally (minus Thailand) with someone from my family, and it was so exciting!

Little bro and I at Copacabana Beach

Events

Once I had a few flights on hold, I was SO excited to pore over the remaining available tickets and see what other Olympic events I could take my brother to see. We ended up with tickets to two rugby events (which amounted to 10 matches!), one beach volleyball event (with one men's and one women's match), and one badminton event. I'll summarize the events in my next blog post since there was SO much to take in there! Aside from the Olympic events, we spent the rest of our time eating delicious Brazilian BBQ, walking around Copacabana Beach, and sitting in traffic getting to and from Corcovado to visit the Cristo Redentor statue (the Christ Redeemer statue) for some of the best views of the city. I was sad that we weren't able to hang glide over the city, something I have wanted to do for a while now, because they closed the air space over the city during the Olympics. Which is probably for the best.

Accommodation 
After putting the flights on hold and picking out which sporting events we wanted to see, the next obstacle was finding affordable accommodation. In London, there was an official Olympic "Camp in London" site, mostly for volunteers, where you could pay 10 pounds a night to set up a tent one Tube station away from the main Olympic park. There was nothing this affordable in Rio this time around, and unfortunately booking so close to the event made finding affordable housing difficult. Even my friends who live in and around Rio were not going to be there during the Olympics. So I turned to my favorite hostel booking website, Hostelworld, to find hostels in convenient locations knowing that prices were 3-4 times their normal price. We ended up booking a stay at the CabanaCopa Hostel located around the corner from the Cardeal Arcoverde Metro Station, the closest metro station to the Beach Volleyball Arena on Copacabana Beach. Normally, a night at this hostel will set you back around $10 per person. We paid over $40 per person for each night during the Olympics, but it was still much cheaper than any other hotel or airbnb I could find so last minute in the right locations with decent reviews. I believe everyone should stay in a hostel at least once, for better or for worse, before they're 30, just to have that experience. And it was my brother's first hostel experience, so I was excited for that. It ended up not being so great since the crowd it drew for the Olympics was much different than the typical hostel crowd in South America that I'm used to. But there we didn't spend much time there anyway, and there was a decent free breakfast! Plus, we got to see monkeys on the property!

Having the flights, accommodation, and events worked out, I pulled the trigger and decided to go to Rio for a weekend of fun Olympic shenanigans! Stay tuned to hear about my spectator experience in my next post!

The view as we left the Beach Volleyball Arena (to the right) with the Cristo Redentor
statue appearing (on the left) over the Copacabana Beach skyline.

Rio 2016 Olympics Ticket Update

So I finally heard from CoSport, the only authorized ticket reseller for any Olympic tickets for residents of the United States, several days ago notifying the public that since they had cancelled their open ticket sales last month, they will be conducting a lottery round for individual tickets to make things more fair. Here is the explanation as detailed in the public email:

This means there is still time for you to request tickets! How the lottery works is each person may request up to 48 individual tickets (not events) based on what CoSport currently has available. Unfortunately, this does not include any Football matches, but there are many other exciting events available! In fact, most other events are available. You add the tickets you potentially want to your cart up until June 10th, then on June 15th, you can log in to CoSport and see if any of your requests were approved via the lottery. You can then choose whether you actually want to purchase the tickets or not. This is great because you may want to go to two or more events that occur at the same time or you may have only been approved for events with a large amount of dates in between where you didn't get tickets, so you are not locked in to any specific match if you don't want to go for the entire two weeks, which would be quite expensive!

I am not exactly sure what anyone's chances are since I was able to purchase tickets during the first-come-first-served phases of both the 2012 London Olympics and the 2014 Sochi Olympics, but it's worth a shot! Here is the current official schedule for this lottery process:

CoSport was also kind enough to provide a short list of tips for entering the ticket lottery in their email as well:

So if you are at all interested in going to the Rio games next summer, go ahead and make your ticket request on CoSport asap! You have until 4pm EST (so 2pm MST in Utah) to do this. I am crossing my fingers that I'll be able to get a few events approved so I can take my lovely parents on this adventure with me for the first time. Good luck to all you who choose to enter! :)

The 2016 Rio Olympics

Three years ago, I had the opportunity to be a spectator at the 2012 London Olympics. It was an amazing experience, and I definitely plan on going to the summer olympics in Rio next year. Here's how I managed to put a trip together last time in light of Individual Tickets going on sale (to Americans) on May 19th at 10am EST.

Tickets

My Sochi Tickets

The biggest obstacle everyone has to attending the Olympics is getting tickets. In 2011, somehow I stumbled across this website, Cosport, which happens to be the only authorized ticket reseller for the Olympics in the United States. This means that the only legal way for any person with a U.S. address to get tickets to the Rio Olympics is through them. If I remember correctly, I actually found out about them through an LA Times article. Either way, I discovered CoSport a few days before they opened a round of Individual Ticket sales. They had a ton of availability for most sports at relatively affordable prices. I found a friend to come with me and I ended up getting tickets to see events in Basketball, Field Hockey, Beach Volleyball, Gymnastics, and Soccer/Football. There were some Tennis and Swimming tickets available, but I couldn't afford to buy absolutely everything I wanted to see. I also got tickets to the 2014 Sochi Olympics last year through CoSport, but I ended up being unable to get to Russia at that time.

When you purchase tickets, you don't know what countries are playing yet, so there is a little bit of chance that goes into that. I actually got lucky enough to watch "Team GB" play in every single event except Beach Volleyball, which I ended up watching Team USA play in. It's always great to root for the home team. The best surprise was being able to see Team GB's very first soccer match of the games in Wembley Stadium. I ended up with amazing seats on the ground level, maybe 20 rows or so from the field at one of the corner sections. I only paid $60 for that seat, and it was an amazing experience to be surrounded by loyal, drunken people from the UK singing fight songs as their team played the UAE. There was even a SWAT style team that came out onto the field when the UAE scored a point. And even Prince William was there. It was great!

The view from my seats at Wembley :)

To top it all off, each ticket included a free day pass for the London Tube. Free transit! So I never had to pay for a single transit ride minus the initial leg to go pick up my tickets. I can't say if Rio will offer a similar free transit program, but they do have a pretty neat bus system so it would be amazing if that was made available again.

Anyway, if you are at all interested in getting tickets to the Rio Olympics, I would urge you to create a CoSport account as soon as you can and set a reminder in your phone to be online and logged in before 10am Eastern Standard Time with an idea of what you actually want tickets to. There is a Competition Schedule on their homepage so you can pick specific dates and events you want to aim for. It even includes pricing schedules. And this is also a friendly reminder that RUGBY will debut in Rio as an Olympic sport for the first time! I will definitely be trying to score some Rugby tickets this time. Rugby and Swimming.

Free Stuff
One important thing to know that makes the Olympics affordable is that there are a TON of sponsors at the Olympics and there are even more companies that want to advertise there as well. This equates to there being a ton of free stuff available for spectators if you know where to look. My favorite perk in this category was being able to enter the Chase VIP Lounge on Pall Mall. All you needed for entry was any Chase Visa card in your name and you could enter with up to 6 guests. In the lounge, Chase offered free Chase Olympic pins, free baseball caps and bags, free food and drink (including European Fanta if you don't drink alcohol!), free calls to the US, free internet, and free unique experiences that you could sign up for. One of those experiences was to have dinner cooked by Chef Morimoto. Yes, THE Iron Chef. I got to have dinner cooked by him and his crew on two separate occasions that week I was there. Best sushi of my life! They also had some meet and greets with various American Olympians on a sign up basis, but the food was more important to me :)

Hanging out with none other than Chef Morimoto! He was excited that I was from Hawaii :)

Flights
Another big obstacle to seeing the Olympics was getting an affordable flight there. London is already a pretty pricey destination in July, so of course demand would push up prices even higher during the Olympic period. My friend purchased her ticket there for around $1500; however, I had some miles saved up on Delta Airlines (which I would not recommend now that they have completely changed their mileage program) and was able to fly to London for 90,000 miles and tax which added up to around $130 roundtrip. A typical off-peak mileage award ticket to Europe is 60,000 miles, but 90,000 miles was pretty standard to go from anywhere in the US to anywhere in Europe in the middle of July. And since I was graduating from my master's program that fall, my parents donated their miles to my cause. That was the best graduation present my parents could have ever given me!

Anyway, my point is that if you know what dates you want to be there and if you can get tickets next week during the first round of open ticket sales, start looking for plane tickets to avoid a high surcharge when demand starts to increase as the games get closer. Airlines typically begin selling tickets 11 months ahead of time, so in August, start looking for tickets whether you are paying with cash or miles. I would highly recommend using miles, and as an added bonus, flights out of Brazil do not collect certain taxes, so if you wanted to add on a flight to Europe from Brazil this might be a good time to do so! Rio also isn't very far from South Africa, one of my favorite places! And there are a number of low cost carriers that fly within South America if you are interested in making a bigger trip out of it. I loved my time in Rio, and I would love to visit Buenos Aires the next time I head down that way. Iguacu Falls is also worth a stop in my opinion. There are a million options! You could even fly into a city not too far from Rio which may be cheaper, then find a bus or low cost airline to get in to Rio. I imagine Sao Paulo might even be a much cheaper option and it's not too far away.

Our campsite

Accommodations
The last major consideration if you want to try to attend the Olympics is accommodations. Hotels and even hostels will jack up their prices due to demand at the time of the Olympics. If you can, finding a friend to stay with would save you a fortune. I ended up spending a part of my time in London with my cousin who lives in Oxfordshire. Oxford isn't super close to London though, so for three nights, my travel buddy and I stayed at a place called "Camp in London" which was literally a campsite one Tube stop over from the Olympic Park where mostly volunteers stayed. It was only 10 pounds per person per night to stay there since we had our own tent. That made it super affordable to stay in the city near the events. It really was amazing. And when else can you safely camp in a big city like London? I am not sure if Rio will be doing something similar, or if it will be as safe even if they do, but this kind of Olympic sponsored affordable accommodation is something to keep an eye out for.

I hope this info helps anyone who might consider going to the Olympics next year! And remember, the first round of Individual Ticket Sales begin next week Tuesday, May 19th, at 10am EST.