Japan Blames a French Contractor and the Tokyo Olympic Scandal as Nagoya's Games Are Branded the Worst Ever

Halfway through the Aichi–Nagoya Asian Games, Japanese media have reached the verdict their organizers hoped to avoid: this may go down as the worst-run edition in the event's history. Tokyo Sports's analysis, relayed across Chinese media on Tuesday, quoted industry insiders rating the operation "far worse than any domestic or international event" they had worked on. The complaints that built to it are by now familiar — container-block athlete housing, poor catering, transport failures — and they have already forced an official apology over the wrong anthem and cardboard bedding, plus a hotel scramble that left China's table tennis team hunting for rooms on day two.

The search for causes has produced a two-target answer. First, the Tokyo Olympics corruption scandal: in its wake, Japanese media report, the country's large event-management companies failed to qualify to run the Nagoya Games, leaving an organizing committee assembled by Aichi Prefecture and the city of Nagoya without experienced hands. Second, and more awkward, the French events group GL Events (智奥会展), which took charge of core operations including venue design, infrastructure, entry management and accreditation. Japanese staff, Tokyo Sports reports, found their proposals waved off with "this is our area of responsibility"; even volunteers, one outlet noted, were asking why a French company was running a Japanese Games. Meanwhile the Olympic Council of Asia pushed participation past the 15,000-athlete ceiling written into the host contract.

The International Olympic Committee's president, Kirsty Coventry, offered the counter-narrative during a visit: the rooms are "slightly compact," she said, but better than some Olympic villages she has stayed in. The compactness is arithmetic — to cut costs, the organizers scrapped the athletes' village altogether and dispersed some 17,000 athletes and officials into accommodation across the region.

The image that crystallized Chinese attention came from the medal ceremonies. On Saturday, viewers noticed the trays being carried by silver-haired volunteers; the Games' roughly 40,000 volunteers, drawn mostly from Aichi Prefecture, range in age from 18 to 91. On Chinese social media the scene was read less as a quirk than as a portrait — a Zhihu question asking why the prize-bearers were "all grandfathers and grandmothers" topped a million heat points, and the phrase travelling with the video called it a "true microcosm of Japan's ageing society."

The Games run to October 4. The host's remaining problem is less logistics than narrative: with the "worst ever" frame now fixed in both Japanese and Chinese coverage, every further stumble confirms it.