What initially started out as a modest $104 million budget, now the Youth Olympic Games budget has increased nearly four-folds to $387 million.
Holy crap right, and to think most Singaporeans don’t even care for the games.
Out of the 320,000 tickets available, currently only half of it has been sold.
Our ‘government-controlled’ newspaper, Straits Times even has their Math fail. A recent article regarding YOG tickets, “YOG tickets selling fast” didn’t depict a true picture of the YOG.
With only 50 per cent of the tickets still left on the market, the article was truly misleading.
And not to add that out of the total tickets sales so far, our government is reported to have bought some 80,000 tickets for our students and civil servants.
Our problem is that, although we are in the league of other Asian countries such as Japan, and South Korea as a developed country, we don’t have a sporting culture like theirs.
Along the line of progress and growth, we’ve discarded the importance of sports, with many parents placing much importance on academics instead.
Even top countries such as USA and Canada swimmers, to powerhouse soccer giants such as Italy, Spain, Brazil, Argentina, England and Portugal has pulled out of the Games, seemingly not interested to take part. Singapore it seems has to resort to ‘entice’ nations to participate. For example in ‘sponsoring’ nations in exchange for their involvement.
Yes it is still a proud moment to be selected as the first host city for the YOG, and an excellent opportunity to showcase Singapore capabilities on a global sporting stage.
But when I read reports of the enormous increased budget, I felt this is going over-board lah, considering that amount of money could be put to other good used.
I could think of plenty of usage for all that money, from fixing our flooding issues, the Singapore Sports Hub which has been delayed since 2005, catering to the increasing social assistance applications, to bridging the increasing gap between the poor and the rich.
Where’s the planning and the restraint by our gahmen and ministers?
Instead I reckon our taxpayers money is used for ‘save-face’ upgrades, services, and improvements for the 40,000 foreign visitors who is set to be involved in the Games.
I predict that some of the new facilities will be white elephant after the Games is over. For example is the new $20 million riding arena, the Singapore Turf Club Riding Centre. Nobody in Singapore can well afford the fees for such a luxury sport.
So I decided to research, and find out where most of the $387 million budget went to.
So far I can only find that $260 million are contracts that has been awarded to local companies. There’s not much info on the breakdown of the $387 million Youth Olympic Games budget. Looks like they don’t want us to know what it’s spent on eh.
