The results of the Olympic ticket lottery for residents of Japan were announced early Thursday morning by the organizing committee of the 2020 Tokyo Games.
Winners are required to purchase their tickets by July 2.
The Tokyo Organizing Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games -- which announced the results on the My Ticket page of the official website at about 2 a.m. -- was to send the results to the applicants' registered email addresses by Thursday night.
Winners must register on the website the name of an individual who is to enter the venue for every single ticket, and choose either a mobile or paper version of the ticket.
Purchasers are asked to pay using a Visa credit card by 11:59 p.m. on July 2. If the total amount is less than 300,000, yen a cash payment can also be made after conducting necessary procedures on the site by that day. The due date for cash payments is July 4.
Tickets are scheduled to be delivered around May 2020, when the seating numbers will have been finalized.
The ticket lottery was held when the total seating capacity was unknown, due partly to the fact that some venues are still under construction. This meant that not all the seats were put on sale.
In autumn, the committee plans to start selling the unsold tickets and those that will be canceled because payment was not completed.
There was significant access to the My Ticket site from Thursday morning, with some time slots showing more than 1 million people on the waiting list to see the results. Some visitors to the site had to wait several hours, sources said.
The committee is calling on applicants not to rush to check the site for their lottery results, as purchases can be made through July 2.
As part of efforts to prevent fraud, such as successful applicants being directed to phony sites, the committee's emails did not contain the URL for the official ticket website.
The committee has not released the winning percentages for each sport, refraining from clarifying how popular each one is.
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