Nagoya’s Asian Games Were Doomed Before They Began

The Nagoya Asian Games: An Event Destined to Spiral Out of Control from the Bid Stage

On September 19, 2026, the Nagoya Asian Games opened. What set off public outrage was not the competition. It was a string of numbers: 241 people stranded at the airport for six hours, two football teams taken by bus to the wrong stadium, and 45 national and regional Olympic committees submitting a joint letter of complaint. This was not one delegation grumbling. It was a collective action involving almost every participating member association.

Did the Olympic Council of Asia actually vet the bid? The record suggests it did not have much chance to.

September 25, 2016, Da Nang, Vietnam. The OCA General Assembly announced that the host city for the 2026 Asian Games would be Aichi Prefecture and Nagoya, Japan. The decision was unanimous, approved by acclamation.

There were no competitors. Apart from Aichi Prefecture and Nagoya, there were no other bidders. Japanese media outlets noted this fact in their reports.

The OCA has a bid review process. Bid cities must submit a Bid Report answering core questions in 13 areas, including city characteristics, area, population, climate, law, economy, transport, hospitality, and competition conditions. The OCA also sends an evaluation team for on-site inspections.

But all of this presupposes one thing: a choice.

When there is only one application on the table, the evaluation report has little to evaluate. It can say the city is the sole candidate and recommend confirming host rights. The OCA did not lack the will to screen. It lacked any alternative.

The review examines paper, not reality.

In the proposal Nagoya submitted in 2016, venue plans, athletes' village arrangements, training facilities, and transport support were all laid out. It promised a "streamlined Games," with a total budget of 85 billion yen, 70 percent of which would be covered by public funds. On paper, it was impeccable.

But the bid report was written in 2016, and the event is being held in 2026. Ten years lie in between. The COVID-19 pandemic, drastic changes in international trade, a sharp depreciation of the yen, rising construction material prices, and climbing labor costs were not variables that could have been written into the bid materials in advance.

More critically, there was personnel turnover. The people who once confidently wrote budgets and made promises are no longer in their original positions. Japan has had five prime ministers since then. The organizing committee's CEO resigned in early 2026. Several key support posts were vacant for more than three months. Those who took over later faced a situation that had already gone badly off track, and their options were very limited.

The budget went from 85 billion to 370 billion.

The total budget of 85 billion yen promised during the 2016 bid was largely based on the accounts of the 2014 Incheon Asian Games. But Incheon's security costs and corporate in-kind sponsorship were not fully reflected as monetary amounts in the accounts. From the very beginning, Japan's estimate differed from actual spending.

By the end of 2025, Aichi Prefecture announced that direct Games expenses had reached 298 billion yen. If venue, transport, infrastructure, and other expenditures borne by the host city are included, the broad hosting cost is about 370 billion yen. That is roughly four times the original plan.

Aichi Prefecture produced its own document explaining the cost inflation: competition events increased from 36 to 41, adding about 8 billion; the true cost of the Incheon model was underestimated in 2016 by about 55 billion; prices, labor, accommodation, and exchange rates rose by about 55 billion; and the OCA and various sports organizations kept making their requirements more specific, adding about 60 billion.

That phrase, "kept making their requirements more specific," points to a larger problem. The OCA continuously raised new requirements during preparations, and each one corresponded to actual expenditure. The OCA's method of oversight drove up costs. Adding events costs money. Raising standards costs money. These added expenses ultimately fell on the host city's finances.

After the budget spun out of control, "frugality" turned into "shabbiness."

The athletes' village originally planned for the old Nagoya Racecourse site had an initial budget of 30 billion yen. Later, because the cost doubled to 60 billion, the organizing committee abandoned it and switched to a patchwork plan of "cruise ship + shipping containers + scattered hotels."

About 2,000 athletes were crammed into temporary container-style housing. A 35-square-meter unit housed four people, and the beds were 195 centimeters long. Basketball players over two meters tall could not even stretch their legs when lying down. After heavy rain, some rooms took on water, and athletes were urgently evacuated.

After an on-site inspection, Chung Jae-yong, vice president of the Korea Basketball Association, said: "If you look only at the accommodation conditions, this is the worst Asian Games in history."

The organizing committee initially prepared its service and operations system for 15,000 people, but eventually more than 17,000 athletes and team officials registered, 2,000 more than expected. The 30 accommodation sites were scattered across five cities: Aichi, Tokyo, Shizuoka, Gifu, and Osaka. The farthest accommodation site was more than an hour from the venues.

The OCA's Guidelines for Hosting Standards clearly require that participating athletes be accommodated in centralized locations on a priority basis, with commuting times in principle not exceeding 60 minutes. Nagoya's dispersed model broke that standard. Japan's own delegation was placed in high-quality hotels only 30 minutes from the venues, while athletes from the Philippines, India, and other countries were assigned to the sites farthest from the venues, with one-way commutes of up to 180 minutes.

The OCA knew about the problem.

In January 2026, more than eight months before the opening, the OCA sent a rectification notice to the Nagoya organizing committee, listing failures in more than 10 core areas, including accommodation and transport. This was extremely rare in the recent history of Asian Games preparations.

But after the rectification notice was issued, the gaps were not filled. They continued to widen.

In response to the accommodation controversy, OCA Director General Mussallam said that all registered athletes, officials, and coaches "have had accommodation arrangements finalized; there is no situation in which anyone has no accommodation," and stressed that the organizing committee should not be pressured according to "textbook rules."

That sentence is itself the answer.

Vietnam won the right to host the 2019 Asian Games in 2012, but in 2014 announced it was giving them up due to financial strain. The OCA even said it would not punish Vietnam. Changing hosts at short notice is a huge headache for the OCA. The 2030 and 2034 Asian Games were ultimately taken up by Qatar and Saudi Arabia precisely because only these wealthy West Asian countries were willing and able to bear the cost of hosting.

Against this backdrop, the OCA's room for accountability was extremely compressed. It could issue a rectification notice eight months before the Games, but it did not dare threaten to "revoke hosting rights." It knew that if it pushed too hard, the host could walk away at any moment, and the OCA would have no replacement city in the short term.

The Asian Games are no longer a hot commodity.

Nagoya planned to sell 2.75 million tickets for the Asian Games, but by late August, less than 30 percent had been sold. The cancellation rate for spectator tour groups exceeded 60 percent. The vast majority of host cities face large-scale losses rather than the expected economic dividend.

The OCA is pushing a reform: moving the Asian Games to the year before the Summer Olympics, making them an Olympic qualifier. The adjustment is expected to begin with the 2030 Doha Asian Games, postponing them to 2031. But whether this can fundamentally solve the Asian Games' attractiveness problem remains unknown.

The OCA did review the bid. But what it reviewed was paper. No matter how beautifully written the bid report was, it could not predict how much prices would rise, how much exchange rates would fall, or how many rounds of personnel turnover would occur ten years later. Review also presupposes choice. When the sole candidate city runs into problems, the room for rejection approaches zero. Oversight after the review was another matter. The OCA could issue a rectification notice before the Games, but it lacked the leverage to play its "revoke hosting rights" card. If it played that card, it might not even be able to keep the table.

The lesson of the Nagoya Asian Games is not whether the OCA "reviewed" or not. It is that when the hosting rights of an international event shift from something "sought after" to something "assigned," the entire governance system has already been distorted. The moment bid competition disappeared, the teeth of review had already fallen out.