Indian Sports Showcase Turns Into Fiasco

An Indian official apologized on Thursday for what he called “a collective failure” by the organizers of the Commonwealth Games, a sporting event due to start in 10 days in Delhi that has been beset by problems.

Teams from several nations have delayed their trips to India after advance delegations reported unsanitary conditions in the athletes’ village, and the collapse of a pedestrian bridge and part of the ceiling at one venue raised concerns about safety.

Speaking to India’s NDTV on Thursday, next to a headline that read, “Collapsing Games, the Joke’s on India,” the treasurer of the organizing committee for the Delhi games, A.K. Mattoo, said, “I feel sad, we are sorry for whatever has happened, directly or indirectly by us or by one of the stakeholders.”

After listing five other government agencies that have been also involved in the preparations for the games, he added: “I genuinely feel sorry for whatever has happened and would like to apologize, not only on our part — the part of the organizing committee — but everybody else connected…. This is a collective failure.” 

As India’s prime minister, Manmohan Singh, got involved in the effort to make sure the games will go ahead, officials from Australia, Wales and Scotland told reporters that they expect to send their athletes after all.

This year’s edition of the games, which are held every four years for athletes from countries that used to be part of the British Empire, was supposed to have been a showcase for modern India, but concerns about accommodations being “unfit for human habitation” were raised this week after advance teams were allowed inside apartments constructed for the athletes.

Reporters have been kept at a distance from the apartments but photographs shot this week of the complex, obtained by the BBC and Reuters, show exposed electrical wiring running through pools of stagnant water, a partially collapsed floor, dirty bathrooms and animal paw prints on a bed.

Reporting from Delhi for the BBC, Sanjoy Majumder wrote this week that what is outside the apartments might be more worrying than what is inside:

The village itself has been built on the banks of the Yamuna River. Just outside it are pools of green, stagnant water left over from flooding after Delhi’s worst monsoon in three decades. It’s a breeding ground for mosquitoes and has raised fears of disease — there have been nearly 100 cases of dengue fever over the past month.

In an interview with Britain’s Channel 4 News on Wednesday, Novy Kapadia, an Indian sports journalist, said that the problems stemmed from “trying to compete with China, saying that we’ll do a Commonwealth Games that will be better than the Olympics in China — which in its own way was quite absurd; it’s a different political system over there [and] they started much earlier.”

He added that “multiple authorities” in Delhi, “got very greedy and ambitious,” in “competing with China, trying to redo the whole of Delhi,” rather than simply concentrating on new sports stadiums and roads around them. “There was no point in trying to restore Connaught Place and getting overambitious and then not finishing anything. That has become the problem for the Commonwealth Games: you tried to climb a mountain; you couldn’t even climb the hill.”

Mr. Mattoo’s apologetic comments on behalf of the organizers marked a sharp departure from remarks made two days earlier by Lalit Bhanot, the committee’s general secretary, who told reporters on Tuesday, “everyone has a different standard of cleanliness. The rooms of the games village are clean according to you and me, but they have some other standard of cleanliness.”

That remark led one NDTV reporter, Sonali Chander, to comment on Twitter that it was “shocking how senior officials make idiotic comments.”

Arguments among officials from other nations and the Indian organizers have spilled into the open this week, but problems have been obvious for some time. Earlier this month, one Indian sports star, Saina Nehwal, was forced to apologize for telling reporters that “looking at the stadiums and looking at the progress, I don’t really think we are capable of holding such big tournaments, because I’ve seen many games, like the Commonwealth Games in Melbourne and the Olympic Games in China — compared to that it’s not up to the mark.”