Around 600,000 tickets for Paris Olympics remain unsold

This includes even blue ribbon events such as the 100m sprint finals

The organisers have confirmed that there are tickets available for more than 20 sports while there are still seats for the 100m sprint and 1500m finals.

Even the opening ceremony on the Seine river has 4000 tickets available, although these are more expensive, higher end prices.

However, many of the seats available are going at the low end of prices, with tickets for the 1500m final going for £71 while the 100m places are on sale for £248.

Organisers confirmed at a Paris press conference that this excess in empty seats is partly due to a late releases of tickets and contingency planning.

Despite the mass of unsold tickets, it is not unusual for the Olympics to have plenty of seats going spare with Rio 2016 seeing 1.3 million tickets unsold at the same stage.

However, London 2012 had only 264,000 unsold at the same time.

President of the Paris 2024, Tony Estanguet, who is also a three-time Olympic champion canoeist, suggested that unsold tickets did not reflect a lack of interest in France, but rather tactical planning from the organisers.

He said: "In total at the beginning, we had 10 million tickets but we took 20 per cent of the total numbers in contingency.

"That’s why there are still tickets available one week before because now we now have the final plan of the delivery."

So far, Paris has sold 8.8million tickets.

The 2024 Paris Olympics began on Friday 26 July and will run until Sunday 11 August.