Government confident that they can finish construction on competition venues in time for 2018 Asian Games

We wouldn’t blame you if you totally forgot about it amidst the endless news about protests, trials, accusations, more protests, bans, etc., but Jakarta is supposed to be getting ready to host a major sporting event next year. Officials in the capital, as well as Palembang in Sumatra, have been preparing for the 2018 Asian Games since Indonesia was awarded hosting duties by the Olympic Council of Asia (OCA) in 2014.

As the second largest multi-sport event in the world after the Olympic Games, hosting the Asian Games is a pretty big deal and a pretty big commitment. Although the Indonesian government has had to deal with some controversy over their choices (most notably a flap over their initial mascot design) as of mid-2016 OCA said that physical preparations were on track for the games to go off as planned.

But how is the government feeling now, with the games coming up in relatively soon in August 2018?

Pretty good, it seems. Coordinating Minister for Human Development and Culture, Puan Maharani, said she was optimistic that the two major construction projects for the game could be completed on time. In fact, she said that they were on track to be finished by the end of this year.

“We are optimistic everything is on schedule and the venues completed. (For example) equestrian venue will be used for a test event in 2017 and will be finished in December 2017,” Puan said after reviewing progress on the Velodrome and Hippodrome sites in East Jakarta today site as quoted by Kompas.

Although Puan noted there were some technical problems relating to the Hippodrome’s certification from animal rights and safety bodies, she said that there was still plenty of time to resolve them before testing on the site began. 

While work on the sports competition venues themselves seems to be on schedule, there’s far less certainty about the supporting transportation upgrades that the government wanted to complete before the games in order to handle the huge number of athletes and spectators. Although it looks like Jakarta’s MRT project will miss the deadline as current projections have it set to open in 2019, but there is still hope that the at least part of the Rp 6.8 billion light rail transit (LRT) system will be ready in time. 

We hope so, because it would be a real shame if all the competition venues were ready but none of the athletes or spectators could get to them in time because they were stuck in macet.



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