THE CANADIAN PRESS

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VANCOUVER - Vancouver's Olympic organizing committee says tickets for the Paralympic Games in 2010 will be affordable.

Caley Denton, vice-president of ticketing for Vanoc, says most of the tickets for sports and ceremony events will start at $20 or less.

Ticket prices will range from $15 for alpine skiing to between $20 and$50 for ice sledge hockey.

Opening ceremony tickets for the Paralympic Games will range from $30 to $175.

Ticket prices start at $10 for group packages of 20 or more people and 85 per cent of all individual tickets are priced at $20 or less, said Denton.

Tickets will go on sale on May 6, 2009.

Denton said officials arrived at the announced prices based on an "analysis of previous Games and what similar sports and different things go for here."

"We had a couple of goals in mind," he said. "One was accessibility and the second was affordability. And we want to grow the Paralympic movement within Canada."

Paralympic Games tickets will be considerably less expensive than for the Olympic Games, but Denton pointed out that there will be about 100,000 tickets for the Olympic Games under $25.

There will be 250,000 tickets for sale for the Paralympics, compared to 1.6 million for the Olympic Games.

Organizers also want to avoid selling most or all of the tickets and then have thousands of empty seats, as was the case at the Games in Beijing.

The tickets for 52 sport and ceremony events at seven venues, for the Vancouver 2010 Paralympic Winter Games, will be on sale on a first-come, first-served basis.

The 2010 Olympic Winter Games will be staged in Vancouver and Whistler from February 12 to 28, 2010, followed by the Paralympic Winter Games from March 12 to 21.