[hafabnew]

While you have many valid points, some of them could be contended:

1) Searching by event makes much more sense than 'show me what's available'. It goes some way to help the tickets (mainly) go to the people who specifically want to see _that_ event.

At a guess, you just wanted to see a random event (and that's fine) and the UX sucked for you. But if you were dying to see the Fencing, you might be glad that Fencing tickets were 'randomly' offered to people who just wanted to see anything :).

2) Showing events that are unavailable, again, this makes more sense than the opposite. If the search didn't show these unavailable events, they would undoubtably be inundated with telephone calls from people asking to buy tickets to these events.

[miahi]

You can solve 2) easily by adding a simple "Fencing (sold out)" label in the list. But it looks like they cannot really tell if an event is sold out.

[dineshk78]

Well it takes a while for the carrier pigeons to come back with ticket status. You can't have EVERYTHING.

[djhworld]

I think with 1) it's less relavent now that the Olympics is on, ticket availability is very sparse.