But the second part is what might have happened had the same fiasco occurred in a Korean stadium, based on what swirled around the anglophone blogs when (among other problems that are not too terribly atypical of massive events, like traffic tie-ups, transportation snafus, and a dearth of rooms) loads of seats were not yet ready for the Formula One in Yeongam last fall.
I say kudos to the Fire Marshal for not signing off on the temporary seats. It would royally suck to spend so much time and money to travel across the US in snowmaggedon and have to watch the game in a "hospitality tent," but that would sure beat whatever disaster might have occurred if those rickety seats were filled by football fans the size of, say, those people on the right who actually got seats.
And it was a good game, by the way, even if Korean hero Hines Ward didn't pull out a victory in the end.
While I often feel that the K-blogosphere can be unreasonably judgemental when discussing administrative or logistical cock-ups that happen in Korea, I don't think their criticism of the Korean Grand Prix was unreasonable. In any international event, the capacity of a country/city to host said event is often called into question: the 2010 World Cup in South Africa (and Qatar is already having to deal with these criticisms despite their World Cup being a good 11 years away), the 2004 Olympics in Athens, the 2010 Commonwealth games in Delhi, and you also raised concerns about the upcoming Winter Olympics in Sochi.
ReplyDeleteWhen you consider that Korea has almost no culture of motorsport (with the exception of racing girls) and that the GP was hosted in one of the more under-developed regions of Korea, I think the concerns and criticisms that were raised were more or less justified, at least in this case.