Donaldson Tan
The first Youth Olympics was held in Singapore
Recently, the Ministry of Community Development, Youth and Sports (MCYS) published a report on the inaugural 2010 Youth Olympics Games (YOG), entitled Blazing The Trail, containing an abundance of statistics. It is unclear by what measure the report concludes there is success and what the objectives of the YOG are. Having organised a few major events (including international ones), personal experience tells me that the sense of success is tied to overall delivery, which I pretty much can gleam from the official report. As long as there is no major cock-ups, delegates and guests are satisfied, financial oversight remains prudent and accountable, an event such as the YOG ought to be considered successful, right?
Unfortunately, such narrow criteria fail to highlight that YOG was an elephant in the room. If you asked drivers, they would share their annoyance of road lanes being diverted for YOG vehicles during peak hours. If you asked netizens, they would share their horrors on the quality of food provided to YOG volunteers. If you asked political observers, they would raise a cause of alarm on how the YOG budget ballooned from S$100M to S$387M. If you asked students at NTU, they would raise the inconvenience of their campus being inaccessible and shift in university timetable as a result of their campus being the host of the Youth Olympic Village. These are feedback that the figures of 266,379,343 reach and editorial marketing value US$45M (approximately S$57M) cannot tell you.
Here are some statistics that certainly raised a few eye-brows:
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There were 6,130 National Olympic Committee delegates, 977 International Federation delegates and 481 officials from the International Olympic Committee. In turn, these people were serviced by 50,688 contractors, voluntary and paid staff. This pans out to be 6.6 servicing personnel per delegate, a tad too excessive?
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The Straits Times reported in May 2010 that 320,000 tickets were put up on sale. However, 283,788 tickets were issued while Singaporeans accounted for 238,063 or 83.8% of the tickets issued. 36,212 tickets remained unsold. 243,168 tickets were issued for games, 18,523 tickets were issued for the opening ceremony and 22,097 tickets were issued for the closing ceremony.
Assuming equal amount of games tickets were sold for preliminary, quarter-final, semi-final and final rounds, revenue from the games tickets is estimated to be S$4.6M. For the opening and closing ceremonies, tickets were offered at $30, $80, $120 and $200. Assuming the $120 and $200 tickets accounted for 1/6 each of the tickets sold for opening and closing ceremonies, while the $30 and $80 tickets accounted for 1/3 each of the tickets sold for opening and closing ceremonies, the estimated ticket revenue for the opening and closing ceremony is $3.7M.
The estimated total ticket revenue is $8.3M and this is far less than the initial budget of $100M. Even if all tickets were sold, it is unlikely for the total ticket revenue to increase such that it would exceed the budget. On top of that, the Singapore government made broadcasting of YOG events royalty-free, so there is one less source of revenue. Together, they make the case for subsequent quadrupling of the YOG budget to $387M even more unacceptable. There are legitimate grounds for raising the YOG budget such as underestimation in the beginning but there is no financial prudence when raising the budget doesn’t improve the margin.
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Food consumption at the Youth Olympic Village appears wasteful. For breakfast, the average consumption per person per meal per day is 1.24kg. For lunch, the average consumption per person per meal per day is 2.06kg. For dinner, the average consumption per person per meal per day is 2.49kg. For snacks, the average consumption per person per meal per day is 0.43kg. The total meal consumed per person per day is 6.22kg. In contrast, an average person consumes 3.6kg food a day. Considering that the Youth Olympic Village serves 7,588 personnel, there ought to be considerable economies of scale to minimise food wastage.
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On the technology front, the smooth running of the YOG events and the 3.5M and 1.0M of unique visitors to the Singapore 2010 website and the WhyOhGee Website was made possible through an impressive technology infrastructure consisting of 2,257 PC/Notebooks, 1,750 fixed telephone sets, 632 printers, 264 servers and 1,800 server-CPUs. If all these equipment were purchased solely to support a 2-week event, how are they disposed off after the YOG? Were they sold to the highest bidder to recover cost? Alternatively, are these equipment made available to charities? Considering that a decent PC/Notebook costs between $1200 and $1800 while heavy-duty printers are in the price range of $200-$400, the estimated total value of these hardware is around a few million dollars.
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The photo is a screenshot from the MCYS Official Report on 2010 Youth Olympic Games.
