ed After the flame is out

The torch that had lit up Incheon for 16 days went out Saturday, and the organizers of the Asian Games may be coming to terms with various bittersweet thoughts.

As is typical with large international events, the Incheon Asian Games had its ups and downs. On the upside, 17 new world records were set in Incheon, compared with just three in Guangzou, China, in 2010. The thrifty operation of this Asiad means that it cost below 500 billion won ($480 million), less than one fourth of nearly $2 billion spent in Doha and Guangzou. Equally meaningful was that there were no safety-related deaths or serious injuries.

Sadly, the dark underside seems to have eclipsed these bright aspects. First and foremost were poor management operations that demonstrated a lack of experience. This was, in large part, the result of the tight budget. Noticeable were a lack of basic amenities, including systems for cooling and heating the athletes’ lodges, and poor transportation facilities, that sometimes left athletes stranded and delayed their arrival at venues.

Volunteers were poorly trained and ill-prepared with some of them even going absent without leave as a way of protesting about insufficient incentives. Others appeared more bent on pestering athletes for photo-ops or autographs.

No less problematic were the poor management of athletic records and facilities, which, among other incidents, caused the games’ torch to go out for 12 minutes, a symbolic accident that characterizes the whole sporting event. The games also showed that unfair and incorrect judgments, a chronic problem during international sports competitions hosted by Korea, have not vanished entirely, either.

Given all these mistakes and the apparent lack of experience, one could hardly believe these were the third Asian Games held in this country, following those in Seoul and Busan. We can’t help but wonder where the accumulated know-how from hosting the 1988 Seoul Olympic Games and the 2012 World Cup finals had gone?

The failure to accrue know-how and experience along with a seeming lack of cooperation among cities is ominous not least because Korea is to host another global athletics event ― the PyeongChang Winter Olympics in 2018. As things stand now, it is hard to rule out the possibility of the winter games ending up as yet another disaster.

All this brings Korea to a more fundamental, longer-term problem ― the wisdom of competing to host mammoth international events, including athletic ones ― in economic terms. Incheon, which issued provincial bonds worth 1.7 trillion won for the Asiad, is expected to suffer a fiscal shortage of dozens of millions of dollars a year for the foreseeable future.

The time is long past for Koreans to allow politicians and the construction industry into deceiving them into hosting large sports events without making proper economic calculations. This is why PyeongChang should be the last such event for Korea to host for a long time.