Skiing officials learned a tough lesson last year, when they jacked up ticket prices for the annual World Cup ski jumping event at the still-new Holmenkollen Ski Jump in Oslo, and ended up with the smallest crowd in years. Now they’ve brought prices back down and sales are brisk.
“Prices cut in half, widespread mobilizing and early promotion have been well-received,” Sverre Seeberg, chairman of the annual sporting event at Holmenkollen, told news bureau NTB. Norway’s ski jumpers have also been doing well in international competition, so that’s likely drawing crowds as well.
Seeberg said around 10,000 tickets have been sold already for the Nordic skiing events that run from March 15-17. The climax is the ski jumping off Holmenkollen, which was totally rebuilt at a cost of more than NOK 2 billion in time to host the Nordic Skiing World Championships in 2011.
Holmenkollen Sunday once drew as many as 100,000 spectators. Seeberg dreams of mounting another of what the Norwegians call a folkefest, literally a “people’s party.” He admits mistakes were made last year, “and now we want the folkefest back.”
newsinenglish.no staff
