Tickets to 2020 Tokyo Olympics in short supply

Want tickets for next year’s Tokyo Olympics? Prepare to be let down.

Millions were disappointed starting Thursday when applicants in a ticket lottery — for Japan residents only — began learning if they landed tickets. The answer is going to be overwhelmingly no. The same will be true for residents outside Japan, who could experience a similar dejection: too much demand and too few tickets.

This was not the case at the past few games — the 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang and the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro — when tickets were given away and volunteers were often summoned to fill empty seats for the television cameras. At times, there were too many empty seats to fill.

“This is probably going to be the most popular Olympics, and possibly one of the most popular events of all time,” Ken Hanscom, the chief operating officer of TicketManager, told The Associated Press in an interview.