Crowd Count Missing and Possibly Crowd : Tickets: Festival officials are unable to give an accurate look at first-day attendance.

After the first full day of competition, U.S. Olympic Festival officials had no idea how many spectators had attended the 15 events held throughout the Southland.

According to Festival spokesman Jim Goyer, Saturday’s ticket sales figures will not be available until today.

“It’s a problem, it’s been frustrating,” Goyer said. “We are relying on Ticketmasters to give us the numbers. Plus, we have sold tickets ourselves. It’s not like we are trying to be vague.”

Goyer did offer some crowd estimates from Saturday’s competition, saying that softball had been sold out. However, softball venue press chief Bill Plummer estimated that attendence for both of Saturday’s sessions was about 1,100--or about half the capacity of Hjelte Park’s stadium.

It has been traditional for Festival organizers to release a daily attendance figure and the U.S. Olympic Committee asks that such a figure be made available. A USOC spokesman said Saturday that the committee had expected that attendence numbers would be provided daily by the organizers on a per-sport basis.

A few numbers were provided Saturday, but they appeared to reflect tickets sold as opposed to actual attendance.

At the boxing venue, 2,175 tickets were announced as sold, while the attendence appeared to be closer to 800. The afternoon session of women’s figure skating had an announced crowd of 3,604 at the 16,000-plus seats in the Forum.

Goyer said that Festival organizers are counting heavily on walk-up sales, a traditionally strong factor in L.A. ticket sales behavior. He said that there were walk-up sales of more than one thousand for figure skating Saturday.

Although the reporting delay is attributed to the use of an outside ticket agency, nearly every sporting event in the Los Angeles area sells tickets in this manner.

Attendence is a key concern for Festival organizers, who must make $3.4 million from ticket sales in order to break even.

“I think it will take a couple of days before we see a real trend,” Goyer said.

Meanwhile, organizers were able to announce that ticket pre-sales were going well in some events, noting that the finals in tennis and racquetball are sold out.

Finals in men’s and women’s basketball and finals for baseball are expected to sell out.