When ticket sales were lagging in 2006 before the Winter Games in Turin, Italy, Italian officials explained that the matter was not so much apathy for the Olympics as it was a cultural mind-set.
“It’s typical for Italians to do things at the last minute,” Giuseppe Gattino, a spokesman for the Turin organizing committee, said at the time.
A few months before last summer’s Rio Olympics, when more than half of the 7.5 million tickets remained unsold, again the host country’s people were blamed for being last-minute shoppers. “Brazilians, they do not buy tickets at such an early stage, as the British or the Germans,” Thomas Bach, the president of the International Olympic Committee, said.