Was It Too Cheap? Unprecedented Disruption and Chaos in Operations

[Anchor]

The cause behind this unprecedented operational disruption ultimately boils down to money and manpower. While the goal of a "financially light and sustainable games" sounded good, they tried to do it too cheaply.

Reporter Hong Seok-jun analyzes the situation from the local scene.

[Reporter]

The day after the Korean Olympic Committee lodged an official protest because the North Korean anthem was played instead of Aegukga, leading to an official apology from the organizing committee, the national anthem was skipped entirely during the women's handball match today (19th).

The Olympic Council of Asia (OCA) decided the previous day to suspend playing national anthems for the time being to prevent similar accidents.

This absurd situation of an "international competition without national anthems" is merely another example of the operational disruptions that have plagued the event from accommodations and transportation to meals for the athletes.

The root cause appears to be budget and manpower constraints.

Nagoya City and Aichi Prefecture, which planned to host the games on a low budget, gave up building a consolidated athletes' village to cut costs, opting instead for a "decentralized model" utilizing cruise ships and container accommodations. Things went awry as the scale of participating delegations turned out larger than initially expected.

In November of last year, the Olympic Council of Asia (OCA) notified Aichi Prefecture of the addition of padel and teqball events. When Aichi Prefecture refused, citing budget and manpower shortages, a bizarre operational structure emerged where international sports federations, rather than the organizing committee, took charge of just those two events.

[Omura Hideaki / Governor of Aichi Prefecture (December of last year): Frankly speaking, due to successive variables, both our manpower and budget have reached their limits, and we are exhausted.]

As the games approached, participating countries notified the OCA and the organizing committee of delegation sizes larger than anticipated, which is analyzed to have led to the current "operational chaos."

Aichi Prefecture claims to have saved a total of over 880 billion won, and the OCA and the organizing committee have insisted that they successfully achieved both cost reduction and eco-friendliness.

[Husain Al-Musallam / OCA Director General: By dramatically reducing costs, this is an eco-friendly and sustainable innovation that enables small and medium-sized nations to host the Asian Games in the future.]

However, growing voices are arguing that instead of focusing solely on the cost itself, consideration should have been given to how much was actually saved when providing the same level of service.

(Video by: Choi Dae-woong | Video Editing by: Lee Seung-jin)
※ Please note: This article was translated by AI and may contain errors.