Synchronised swimming was an event which was not initially oversubscribed but when sessions for the sport were put back up for sale, a human data error meant that 20,000 tickets were put on sale in the second round of sales rather than 10,000.

Around 3,000 people have already been contacted by London 2012 about the error and have been offered the chance to exchange their tickets for other events, including some of the most high profile Olympic events such as athletics and diving.

At least 200 have been given the opportunity to upgrade their tickets so that they can see the final of the men's 100 metres, which is set to feature Usain Bolt, because one of the synchronised swimming sessions was on the same afternoon as the event, August 5.

The error occurred in the summer, between the first and second round of ticket sales, when a member of staff made a single keystroke mistake and entered "20,000" into a spreadsheet rather than the correct figure of 10,000 remaining tickets.

"As a result of finalising the seating configurations in our venues and reconciling the millions of Olympic and Paralympic ticket orders against the seating plans for around 1,000 sporting sessions, we have discovered an error in seats available in four synchronised swimming sessions," said a London 2012 spokeswoman.

"In December we contacted around 3,000 customers who had applied for tickets in the four sessions during the second round sales process.

"We are exchanging their synchronised swimming tickets for tickets in other sports that they originally applied for."

Ticketing has been one of the toughest challenges for London 2012 after hundreds of thousands of applicants failed to obtain any tickets.

There were complaints last summer when the official website struggled to cope with the huge demand but more than a million extra tickets are due to go on sale in May.

These had been held back by London 2012 while seating positions were confirmed at all the venues but it is some of these tickets which have been made available to those who had originally been expecting to watch synchronised swimming.

The Olympic synchronised swimming event is set to take place at the Aquatics Centre on the Olympic Park from August 5 to 10 where 104 competitors, all of them women, will compete in two medal events.

Meanwhile, the process for people to resell any unwanted tickets in their possession opens this Friday (January 6).

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