The Aichi-Nagoya Asian Games close on Sunday with Japan's organisers facing hard questions. After two weeks of operational failures, a sports psychology professor warned that trust in Japan as a host may have fallen, should it bid for the Olympics again.
The trouble started with accommodation. To keep costs down there was no athletes' village. Teams were split across hotels, temporary wooden huts and a cruise ship, and there were not enough beds for the more than 17,000 athletes and officials after numbers grew by around 2,000. Some delegations said they were left waiting up to six hours at the airport when they arrived. Athletes were also bused to the wrong venues, and North Korea's anthem was played for South Korea's hockey team.
Crowds were thin at some events, beginning with thousands of empty seats at the opening ceremony. South Korea's Olympic committee president Ryu Seung-min was blunt: "If I were to give them a grade, it would be an F."
Japanese Olympic Committee president Seiko Hashimoto acknowledged the criticism, and Nagoya's mayor apologised to athletes for the mishandling. The Olympic Council of Asia pointed instead to more than 50 world records and argued that the Games leave no white elephants behind. The verdict lands only a few years after the cost overruns and corruption scandal of Tokyo 2021.
Source
Original summary by Proventier.