Gwangju took lessons from Incheon
By Nam Hyun-woo
GWANGJU ― As the 2015 Gwangju Universiade nears its final stages, organizers are happy that they learned lessons from the 2014 Incheon Asian Games, which was largely criticized for poor operations.
Starting with the opening ceremony, the Gwangju Universiade has proceeded without any major problems.
Before the Universiade kicked off, concerns outweighed expectations because of the limited budget.
The organizers set 685.7 billion won as its total budget and relatively small 218.6 billion won was shouldered by the central government.
The Gwangju games received little public attention. Korea has already hosted many major international sporting events, including the Olympics, the World Cup, the Formula One Grand Prix and the Asian Games. The Universiade, whose popularity is lower than the aforementioned events, was held in Korea twice before in Daegu in 2003 and the winter event in Muju in 1997.
This caused worries that the Games would end up bringing enormous debts to the city.
Gwangju organizers say they opted to focus on managing “small and trivial things” rather than increasing the size of the event.
Though the organizers refrained from mentioning the Incheon Asiad directly, they said they studied the failure of the 2014 event thoroughly.
“The previous event (Incheon Asiad) failed not because there wasn’t enough investment or the event was small in size,” said an official at the organizing committee. “When you look into the Incheon Asiad, you can easily find that trivial things added up to the problems,” he said.
The Incheon Asiad torch, which is supposed to be kept lit during the games, went out for 12 minutes. A malfunctioning sensor that nobody checked caused this.
The Gwangju Universiade organizers have formed a torch management team, to keep the flame burning since the torch was carried into the Main Stadium on the opening day of event on July 3. And so far, the flame is burning well, braving the strong wind and rain brought by typhoons
Also, thoughtless behaviors by some volunteers ― requesting photos for athletes in their training or taking official match balls for baseball games ― tarnished the reputation of not only the volunteers but also the whole Incheon event.
Except for assigning a judo referee who has been implicated in a corruption scandal, no organizer had to apologize for any mishandling of the press, something that the media experienced every day during the Incheon Asiad.
The organizers not only took lessons from the Incheon event, but also took supplies. The 153 podiums that are used during the medal awarding ceremonies here are those used during the Incheon Games. Sixty-seven trays for medals were also those used in Incheon. By doing so, the organizers cut 800 million won from its initial budget for medal awarding ceremonies.
Along with other efforts to cut cost, the Gwangju organizers managed to keep the operation cost at 283.4 billion won, about 59 percent of that of the Incheon Asian Games (482.3 billion won).
This bears an important lesson for the 2018 PyeongChang Winter Olympic Games organizers. During the past week, a number of key officials at the 2018 PyeongChaong Olympics organizing committee visited Gwangju to look at how organizers were operating the event.
“We have got some hints for a successful hosting of the PyeongChang Games at Gwangju and we will apply these,” said an official of the PyeongChang committee.