The Nagoya Asian Games Are a Disaster. The French Company Isn't the Reason.

How the Nagoya Asian Games Turned a Continental Sporting Event into a Supply-Chain Accident Scene

September 19, 2026, Nagoya Port.

The Italian cruise ship Costa Serena slowly docked. The vessel would accommodate about 4,000 Asian Games participants. Alongside it stood roughly 200 container-style prefab housing units, plus dozens of hotels scattered across Aichi, Gifu, Shizuoka, and even Tokyo. One accommodation system. Thirty standards.

Three days later, a player from the South Korean men's basketball team posted a video on social media. The sink was leaking; water covered the floor. He said nothing to the camera. He simply turned the phone toward the drain that kept overflowing and held it there for five seconds.

That same day, 240 members of the Chinese delegation landed at Chubu Centrair International Airport. The information verification system crashed. They were stranded in the arrivals hall for nearly six hours. A staff member later explained: "The system is new, but the network is old." An Indian athlete waited forty minutes at the registration counter before telling a volunteer, "I've become a ghost in the system." When the volunteer was later asked his age, he said: seventy-three.

This is not a joke. This was daily life three days before the 2026 Asian Games began.

I. The Budget Quadrupled, and the Accommodation Went Downhill

In 2016, when Aichi Prefecture and Nagoya City submitted their bid to the Olympic Council of Asia, they wrote down a number: 85 billion yen.

That figure was based on the 2014 Incheon Asian Games. But Incheon's security costs and corporate in-kind sponsorship had not been fully reflected in the accounts as monetary amounts. From the start, the Japanese side had built on a distorted cost baseline. Ten years later, by the end of 2025, the direct budget for the Games had reached 298 billion yen, and the broader hosting cost was about 370 billion yen, nearly four times the original figure.

The money went to four places. The Aichi prefectural government produced its own document to explain: competition events increased from 36 sports to 41, adding about 8 billion yen; the true cost of the Incheon model was underestimated in 2016 by about 55 billion yen; rising prices, labor costs, and exchange rates added about 55 billion yen; and the OCA and various sports organizations kept making their requirements more specific, adding about 60 billion yen.

Every item was documented. Every item was reasonable. But put together, the result was an athlete sleeping in a container.

Even more absurdly, the organizing committee initially proposed holding some events in Tokyo to use existing venues and cut costs. But the OCA, citing the "cap on participating athletes," unilaterally demanded that the number of participants be pushed above the 15,000 limit stipulated in the contract. Aichi objected but could not stop it. The gap directly forced a redesign of the accommodation plan: containers, cruise ships, and scattered hotels, three schemes running in parallel.

Nearly four times the original budget was spent, yet athletes slept worse than in Incheon. The money went to cost overruns and compliance, not to athlete housing. What remained for accommodation was the minimum. Budgetary loss of control came first, cost-cutting came second. The two combined, and what got squeezed in the end was athletes' basic experience.

II. 40,000 Volunteer Slots, One Quarter Filled

The original plan called for recruiting 40,000 volunteers. About 10,000 showed up. A 75 percent shortfall.

There was only one eligibility threshold: at least 18 years old, with no upper age limit. On paper, it looked inclusive. In practice, it was helplessness.

Japan has about 36.24 million people aged 65 or older, 29.6 percent of the population. Young people have to work, study, and deal with their own lives. For many, volunteering that required full blocks of time over many consecutive days was not a matter of not wanting to; it was a matter of not being able to afford it. Retirees thus became the only volunteer labor pool that could be mobilized on a large scale. On the medal podiums stood large numbers of silver-haired ceremonial staff in their sixties and seventies. The oldest volunteer was 91.

The organizing committee didn't design it this way. Japan's aging society produced this volunteer profile. The committee simply set the age floor at 18 and the ceiling nowhere.

But the problem is that the volunteer system at a major event is never just about moving things and pointing directions. Information relay, emergency response, and cross-department coordination impose rigid demands on physical stamina, reaction speed, and system operation skills. When a volunteer force composed mainly of retirees faces room assignments, transportation dispatch, and emergencies for 17,000 participants, capacity runs out. That is not a criticism of older people. It is a limit built into the task.

Nagoya's shuttle buses had no dispatch platform, no unified command, and no updated GPS maps. Elderly drivers had to read paper maps to find their way. Before a South Korea vs. Qatar men's football match, both teams' buses went to the wrong venue. No single person caused this. The dispatch system had never been established.

III. Who Was Responsible for What Was Deliberately Blurred

Japanese media pointed the finger at the French company GL events. The Lyon-based company was responsible for multiple core aspects of these Asian Games, including venue design, infrastructure construction, admission management, accreditation, and medal ceremonies. The contract was worth about 63 billion yen. According to sources, it was chosen because it was "overwhelmingly cheap."

GL events has worked on many top-tier events worldwide. It participated in the 2018 Jakarta Asian Games, the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, the 2024 Paris Olympics, and the 2026 Milan-Cortina Winter Olympics. In China, joint ventures such as CIEC GL events, GL events Pengcheng, and Shanxi Construction Investment GL events operate normally, undertaking events such as the Taiyuan Energy Low Carbon Development Forum and the FASHION SOURCE Expo, with no public operational accidents or collective customer complaints.

A company with nearly fifty years of history that had never had a systemic problem at a top-tier multi-sport event suddenly "lost its late-career reputation" in Nagoya. The reason is simpler than a company forgetting how to work.

The boundary of responsibility was deliberately blurred.

GL events' contract covered venues and ceremonies. But athlete room assignments, food supply, and transportation dispatch, the things that drew the most complaints, were not within its direct scope. Cruise accommodation was operated jointly by Costa Cruises and JTB; food was provided by suppliers separately arranged by the organizing committee; transportation dispatch was coordinated by the organizing committee. In a September 22 statement, the Japanese organizing committee even volunteered that the food at the teqball venue was poor, "but those meals were not provided by the organizing committee."

That sentence exposed the problem: no matter who supplied the food, choosing suppliers, supervising quality, and ensuring athletes' basic needs were met were the organizing committee's own inescapable responsibilities. A general contractor can be responsible for building the stage, but who decides what is performed on it, what the performers eat, and how the audience enters, that is the host's job.

One line repeatedly cited by Japanese media is that the French side refused to listen to Japanese opinions on the grounds that "this is our area of responsibility." But think about it: if the Japanese side made "overwhelmingly cheap" the selection criterion during contract negotiations, then a low-bid winner would naturally use strict contract boundaries to limit its own scope of responsibility. This is the inevitable result of commercial logic. Choosing the lowest-priced contractor and then expecting flexibility beyond the contract is itself a logical failure by the decision-makers.

IV. What the Corruption Case Severed Was Not "Problem Companies" but "the Ability to Solve Problems"

In November 2022, the Tokyo District Public Prosecutors Office and the Japan Fair Trade Commission jointly raided the headquarters of Dentsu, the home of a senior Tokyo Olympic organizing committee official, and the event marketing company Cerespo. These companies were suspected of bid-rigging in the bidding for the right to organize Tokyo Olympic test events, with related contracts totaling over 500 million yen. Afterwards, Dentsu and several other companies were suspended from bidding. Aichi Prefecture then issued a named suspension against Dentsu, directly cutting off the company, which had played a key coordinating role in successive major events, from participating in these Asian Games.

The corruption case removed "problematic participants." But the problem is that after the purge, the organizing committee did not put effort into identifying and rebuilding domestic professional capacity. Instead, it chose the easiest path: skipping the repair of the local event-operations ecosystem and directly outsourcing core operations to the lowest-bidding foreign company.

This was both "giving up treatment" on the local ecosystem and a serious underestimation of the complexity of international cooperation.

GL events' successes at international events shared one common premise: the host itself had strong coordination capacity, and the contractor was executing specific tasks within a mature operational framework. When the host itself lacked experience, had a tight budget, and was short on manpower, the contractor's "professional ability" became an over-expected variable.

GL events' execution was one part of the Nagoya chaos. The larger failure came from a project that had been systematically distorted from the budgeting stage, crushed by a collapsed manpower structure, missing coordination capacity, and short-sighted decision logic.

V. Blame-Shifting Is a Confession of Governance Incapacity

The Japanese organizing committee argued in a statement that "the organizing committee is not the cause of this chaos." Japanese media, meanwhile, pointed at the French company for "not listening."

But the fundamental flaw in this narrative is: the contract was signed by the Japanese side. The budget was compiled by the Japanese side. The organizing committee was formed by the Japanese side. The volunteer recruitment criteria were set by the Japanese side. And the contingency plan for when the number of participants exceeded the cap was also something the Japanese side needed to prepare.

Pushing all of this onto a foreign contractor chosen on price alone is not only unfair; it is an evasion of governance responsibility.

In the end, the Nagoya Asian Games may not go down in history as the "worst Asian Games ever." But it is destined to become a specimen: when a country's capacity to organize major events is weakened by a corruption scandal, when it chooses lowest-price outsourcing under fiscal pressure, and yet refuses to acknowledge its own fundamental coordination failures, chaos stops being an accident. It becomes the product of how the system runs.

The containers are still at Nagoya Port. A ninety-one-year-old stands on the medal podium. Athletes record videos in rooms where the sink leaks.

And the organizing committee says: This is not our fault.

The contract was signed by the Japanese side. The budget was compiled by the Japanese side. The organizing committee was formed by the Japanese side.

Then they turn around and say: It's all the French's fault.