Seven years after staging a well-attended 2002 Winter Olympics, Utahns have shown little interest in next February's Vancouver Games.

But another opportunity to buy tickets starts this week.

CoSport, the company that has exclusive rights to sell 2010 Winter Olympics tickets in the United States, will sell 40,000 tickets on a first-come, first-served basis starting at noon Thursday. The sale will be conducted online at www.cosport.com. To participate, ticket buyers must establish an account -- for free -- at the same Web site by 7 a.m. Thursday.

"Our demand has been strong," said CoSport executive Mark Lewis, who was in charge of the Salt Lake Organizing Committee's joint marketing venture with the U.S. Olympic Committee for the 2002 Winter Games. "One of the things driving that is that with Seattle being so close, we've had a lot [of] demand from the state of Washington."

But hardly any from Utah.

"Just 0.2 percent," said Lewis, adding "I'm surprised there is not more Olympic interest, especially since Delta [Air Lines] flies there directly from Salt Lake City three times a day. I would think a lot of people would want to watch the Olympics again."

But it's mostly Californians -- traditionally the purchasers of the most Olympic tickets -- who are buying. "They're right up there neck-to-neck with Washington," Lewis said.

Everen Brown, a Salt Lake City businessman who has attended 10 Olympics since the 1984 Games in Los Angeles, offered an explanation.

"It was cheaper to fly to Beijing for 15 hours than the 1.5-hour flight to Vancouver," he said, citing Delta nonstop flights that were listed Monday at $2,338 round trip, while six-hour flights with a stop in Los Angeles cost $1,541.

Hotels are expensive, too. He found a one-room hostel with a shared bathroom for $130 [Canadian]. "Other than that, rooms are in excess of $1,000 per night," he said. "No bargains yet."

Despite the economic downturn, first-round ticket sales were reasonably strong in Canada and the U.S.

Vancouver's organizing committee (VANOC) sold more than $94 million worth of tickets in the first round of sales and had Canadian requests for $345 million.

South of the border, Lewis added, "we virtually sold out of everything. We literally had a handful of tickets left."

So CoSport asked VANOC for more tickets, then supplemented what it got with some from its cache as a sponsor. The 40,000 on sale this week are slightly more than its original allocation, he said.

CoSport sells individual tickets, rooms and packages. Tickets are available for all sports -- but not all events -- and seats at prized medal events are likely to sell fast, Lewis said.

Vancouver hopes to sell 1.6 million tickets, roughly the same as Salt Lake. SLOC sold 95 percent of its tickets, raising $183 million -- $3 million more than projected.

Paralympic tickets went on sale last week. Seventy percent cost less than $20, ranging from $15 for many events to $175 for the best opening ceremony seats.

mikeg@sltrib.com