DAVOS, Switzerland (AP):

The cost of staging the London Olympics remains within budget and glitches in the ticketing process are being ironed out before the next batch goes on sale in April, organising chief Sebastian Coe said yesterday.

In an interview, the two-time 1,500-metre Olympic champ- ion defended his organisation against charges that ticket sales have been flawed from the very beginning.

Last year, organisers put the first batch of tickets on sale via a complicated ballot system. Many customers were left empty-handed and others ended up with far fewer tickets than they had hoped for and often not the ones they had wanted.

"We've done it in bigger numbers than anything on the planet," Coe said.

Coe said he had three objectives for the Olympic ticketing process, making sure the venues were full throughout the games, selling a large chunk of the tickets at affordable prices and raising a quarter of his committee's £2billion (US$3.1 billion) private operating budget.

About 1.9 million people made 24 million ticket applications for the six million tickets available through the ballot. Some people now want to offload their Olympic tickets and the London organisers created a resale website for that. However, the site, operated by Ticketmaster, was unable to cope with the traffic and was shut down within hours of its launch earlier this month.

Although the site has now reopened to allow customers to sell unwanted tickets, prospective buyers won't be able to purchase any until April.