Wrong Anthem, Cardboard Beds: Nagoya's Asian Games Logistics Draw an Official Apology

Before South Korea's men's hockey team faced Bangladesh at the Aichi–Nagoya Asian Games on Friday, the stadium played the wrong country's anthem. Instead of South Korea's, the melody was North Korea's. Players took their hands off their chests and turned to the officials; the organizers stopped the music, played Bangladesh's anthem first, and only got round to South Korea's as the teams finished greeting each other. The organizing committee apologized the same day, and South Korea's Olympic authorities, having verified the error from video evidence, say they plan a formal protest.

The apology was, by then, becoming a genre. In 2024, an announcer at the Paris opening ceremony introduced South Korea's delegation as North Korea's, and the IOC formally apologized — and misnaming the two Koreas, divided for eight decades and still technically at war, is not treated in Seoul as a sound-check slip. On Chinese social media, the incident was read the same way, with posts noting that the correct anthem was played only "as the match was about to start."

The anthem was one entry in a longer ledger. A Weibo post rounding up the Games' mishaps under the heading "the extent of the chaos at this Asian Games" has drawn thousands of reposts and comments with a ten-item list: the anthem error; South Korea's footballers bussed, by mistake, to a baseball stadium; China's gymnasts held for around seven hours at the airport while an accreditation system recognized only two of their 21 athletes; host Japan's own men and women athletes housed in mixed quarters; a South Korean player posting "please save us" over a leaking sink in a container dorm; China's badminton team, never picked up by an official bus, rescued by local Chinese volunteers' cars; a waterlogged cricket outfield that turned the tournament into a seeding table — eliminating China's women; Thailand's sepak takraw team stranded at the airport for 24 hours because officials never registered their housing list; and a welcome event that cast an actor as Toyotomi Hideyoshi, the warlord who invaded Korea in the 1590s, drawing a protest from the South Korean delegation.

The most consequential items concern where athletes sleep. There is no athletes' village: most delegations are berthed on a cruise ship or in prefabricated container units, a rainstorm forced an evacuation of the temporary housing this week, and a typhoon is now forecast. Singapore triathlete Luke Chua toured his room in a video that Chinese outlets relayed: the bed frame, he discovered, was cardboard — "I guess everything in here is made of cardboard" — though, he allowed, it held his weight, and so did the cardboard bicycle rack.

For table tennis, the logistics are the controversy. Chinese fans argue that a sport decided by millimeters of feel cannot survive the host's arrangements: China's paddlers are housed on the cruise ship, a 90-minute drive each way from the venue — three hours a day of commuting — while Japan's team stays twenty minutes away. South Korea's team, along with those from Chinese Taipei and Macao, gave up and checked into hotels. To many Chinese readers the arithmetic amounts to a quiet home advantage, and with India's media asking whether any other host would have escaped a global scandal — its own delegation waited more than twelve hours at the airport and missed breakfast over an unrecorded booking — the question has outgrown Chinese fandom.

The failures predate the athletes: Nagoya's transport breakdown stranded delegations at the airport before the opening days, and the hotel chaos ran into a second day before a ball was played. The organizers now face a typhoon, and a table tennis tournament — the sport China treats as its birthright — to run without one.