A total of 20,000 tickets have been cancelled by the Vancouver Olympic organisers for events on Cypress Mountain for safety reasons.

The VANOC said in a statement that recent warm weather and heavy rain has wased away almost 30 centimeters of snow at the venuw and made the general admission standing room spectator area unsafe.

Events affected include the men's and women's halfpipe, men's and women's ski cross, and men's and women's parallel giant slalom.

In daily press briefing, Caley Denton, vice president of ticketing from VANOC, said,"at the end of the day (Monday), we came to the conclusion that it's too unstable up there and too unsafe to have people in big numbers walking around the side of the courses. We had a little bit more rain last night that continues to take some of the snow away."

"The total number of spectators affected is about 28,000 over the course of a few weeks. So today's announcement would be an additional 20,000," said Caley.