In case you don’t know (and chances are you won’t) Singapore is currently holding the inaugural Asian Youth Games (AYG) at the moment. Young athletes from around Asia are currently battling for honors; unfortunately the AYG so far has been nothing short of a disastrous.
First even before the games began, there was the H1N1 scare. Several athletes from various countries had been struck by the H1N1 and their teammates had to be isolated for 7 days. This means that for team sports like football, the matches had to be postponed. Amazingly no matches were cancelled, and all the affected matches were postponed. This caused a scheduling headache and even the teams were unsure where and when they would be playing their matches. The H1N1 also caused the Malaysian team to pull out of the AYG. Ironic because we have teams from Japan and Saudi Arabia but our closest neighbor Malaysia was the one who pulled out.
Another thing is that athletes are playing in near empty stadiums. The Singapore Sports Council announced this week that only 7% of the tickets have been sold so far, and things are not looking up in the near future.
H1N1 scare, pull-out, empty stadiums; yes it has been a disaster.
4 comments:
Now why am I not surprised? Maybe all those media hypes and propaganda do more to turn off the anticipation and excitement than what the organisers hoped for, I guess...
And with the economic downturn and H1N1 scare at hand, attending an event such as the AYG, night F1, or even the NDP might be the last thing in the mind of the average Singaporean.
Let's see what the government can do to savage the mess.
Do you know that when they showed the daily highlights they never even bothered to show the whole 400m finals? You see the start and then it jumped to the finish. So far I have been less than impress with coverage and with the AYG already under away, it might be too late to do anything about it
Yeah, if you wanna watch the full coverage of the AYG, you need to subscribe to the sports news channel.
It seems the government and local media still think there's profit to glean from all these activities, despite the fact that they're always half a step behind time and trend.
Being optimistic is one thing; but self-delusion is not going to get anyone anywhere, especially when you try to commercialise everything for monetary gain. In the end, there'll be no winners.
Make money? I'll be amazed if the AYG even just cover cost.
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