TRAVEL INSIDER : To Score Olympics Seats, Move Fast, Bring Money : Sports: Tickets to the Sydney 2000 Games are selling quickly for up to $1,054. Prices have shot up eightfold in 12 years, by one estimate.

If you want tickets to the Olympics (Sept. 15 to Oct. 1, 2000), the time to send off your request and your money is now--but don’t expect any bargains. In the last 12 years, the cost of attending individual Olympic events has zoomed skyward.

Ticket prices begin at $8 (most of those are for soccer preliminaries in Adelaide, about 700 miles from Sydney), but top out at a hefty $1,054 (for the best seats at opening or closing ceremonies). The cheapest seats for opening or closing ceremonies go for $385.

“The Olympic Games are fast becoming the exclusive property of the super-rich,” complains Denny Nivens, a Hermosa Beach sports fan who has been attending Olympic events since 1988. Nivens, who recently wrote this newspaper to complain about the escalation of ticket prices, recalls that in 1988, he paid $416 for two tickets each to 14 key events at the Seoul Summer Games. Using old Olympic ticket programs, he calculated that four years later in Barcelona, the same tickets would have cost $1,278. The Atlanta price, four years after that: $2,218. And at the prices to be paid by Sydney-bound Americans in 2000, Nivens reckons, those same tickets will cost $3,276--a nearly eightfold increase over 12 years.

“It’s pretty dramatic,” agrees Don Williams, vice president for sales and marketing at Cartan Tours, a Manhattan Beach agency that holds the exclusive Olympic ticket agent concession in the U.S. The top price for a ticket to the Atlanta closing ceremonies, Williams notes, was $646--a good $400 less than next year’s price.

Prices are set by organizers in sponsor countries, subject to approval from the International Olympic Committee. But the first stop for any American considering an Olympics visit next September is probably Cartan Tours (1334 Parkview Ave., Suite 210, Manhattan Beach, CA 90266; telephone [800] 818-1998, fax [310] 546-8433, Internet https://www.cartan.com). Cartan’s role as exclusive ticket agent means that other packagers are acquiring their tickets from Cartan.

The company has been taking paid orders since April, but cannot guarantee seats until a ticket lottery in October decides who gets what. Customer requests are grouped by month, so that those who acted in April have a better chance of getting their first choices than those who acted in May, and so on. Beyond October, Cartan will continue selling tickets for as long as supplies last, a spokesman said.

Quickest-selling events include the opening and closing ceremonies, basketball, swimming, diving, gymnastics and track and field.

In addition to tickets, Cartan sells travel packages, which include tickets, air fare, lodging, breakfast and daily transportation to events. The packages run roughly $5,000 to $7,400, depending on the hotel. To simplify its sales, the company has broken its packages down into three “waves” of six nights each: One includes Sept. 15 opening ceremonies, another includes the competition-heavy middle days of the Games and a third includes the Oct. 1 closing ceremonies.

Reservations agents at Qantas Vacations (tel. [800] 641-8772) say they won’t have any detailed information until late this month or early October.

If you want to get your air tickets separately, you’ll need good timing. United, Qantas and Air New Zealand fly from LAX to Australia, but standard scheduling calls for tickets to go on sale about 11 months before the date of travel--which means that bookings for mid-September 2000 should become available around mid-October. Fares, however, are unclear. On United, for instance, advance-purchase round-trip fares for flights this month between LAX and Sydney run as low as $1,248. But nobody can say how much carriers will boost their prices to capitalize on the Olympics.

Still, there are encouraging words from veteran Olympics-watcher Ray Olsen, the Ohio-based publisher of the quarterly newsletter “Stepping Stones to the Sydney Games.” He has been attending the Summer Games since 1984.

“They really are very well organized” in Sydney, says Olsen. He noted the large-scale events Sydney officials have staged as quasi-rehearsals at many Olympic venues and the public transit connections to the Homebush Bay area where most Olympic facilities are clustered. (The organizers’ official Web site, https://www.sydney.olympic.org, offers a broad overview of Olympic preparations.)

Though Sydney has more than 80,000 hotel, motel and guest-house rooms, Olsen warns that many of the most desirable have been blocked off for members of “the Olympic family”--perhaps 25,000 international sports and government officials, sponsors, media personnel and so on. Many of the remaining rooms have been claimed by package tour operators. (The next issue of Olsen’s newsletter is due this month. A subscription is $44 for six issues; write P.O. Box 605, Aurora, OH 44202, or e-mail rayolsen@aol.com.)

On a visit to the Ray White Real Estate Organization (Internet https://www.raywhite.net), which has a government-approved concession to arrange private home rentals, Olsen made a booking for himself. Travelers can rent one or two bedrooms in an owner-occupied home, or rent an entire home while its owners relocate. Last spring, Olsen said, he rented a four-bedroom house near the Olympic velodrome site for three weeks at $3,500 per week.

One other factor for would-be Olympic visitors to keep in mind: You’ll be joined by a lot of Australians, who are buying at a vastly faster rate than Americans did for the Atlanta Games. On Aug. 15, organizers reported that in the first seven weeks of ticket applications within Australia, more than 319,000 orders came in. That pace put the Sydney Games ahead of the 312,000 orders received by the Atlanta Games at the same stage--despite the fact that Australia has less than one-tenth the U.S. population.

Christopher Reynolds welcomes comments and suggestions, but cannot respond individually to letters and calls. Write Travel Insider, Los Angeles Times, Times Mirror Square, Los Angeles 90053, or send e-mail to chris.reynolds@latimes.com.