MOSCOW, February 7 (R-Sport) - A rush for tickets for the Sochi 2014 men’s hockey final made them unavailable within half an hour of going on sale Thursday.

Tickets sales for all events started online Thursday, a year before the opening ceremony of Russia’s first Winter Olympics.

The fact that hockey final tickets were unavailable so quickly did not necessarily mean a sellout, merely that customers had put all the tickets into their online baskets ahead of purchase, organizers suggested.

"If a consumer doesn't not acquire the tickets or mangage to buy them in the required time, they will return to free sale," the Sochi 2014 organizing committee told R-Sport.

Sochi tickets can be bought outright online subject to a security check, unlike the system of applications and random draws used at London 2012.

It was not yet immediately clear whether further tickets for the hockey final would be made available at a later date, nor how many would be sold through foreign partner agencies.