Here's One Reason Why So Many Asian Games Events Look Empty on TV

In fact, it's been so popular that a lot of events were totally sold out. But then why were so many seats left vacant on television broadcasts? The Olympic Council of Asia (OCA) was wondering the same thing. The OCA recently accused the local Asian Games organizer, the Indonesian Asian Games Organizing Committee (INASGOC), of handing out too many free tickets to VIPs and foreign dignitaries, with as much as 40 percent of the tickets in some arenas were taken off the market before the games even began.

“This is causing a great deal of confusion and does not look good on the broadcasting when there are empty seats,” the OCA said in a letter.

Meanwhile, the situation for the rest of us has been… confusing to say the least. VICE staff who visited the Gelora Bung Karno, in Senayan, during the Asian Games, found long lines of sports fans from across Asia, many of whom were confused as to how to even get a ticket in the first place.

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The original online vendor, Kiostix, suffered from such bad technical difficulties that a second online vendor, Blibli.com had to step in to soak up some of the digital demand. But even if you got a ticket from one of these vendors, what you got sent to your email wasn't even an actual ticket. It was a document you had to physically print and bring to the stadium complex to get the actual tickets, an added step that sort of defeats the whole purpose of an e-ticket in the first place.

Adelia Putri got her tickets early. She was really looking forward to cheering for the national badminton team and was able to get her tickets through Kiostix before heavy demand slowed the process down. But actually getting her hands on those tickets proved to be a weird, difficult task.

She had to exchange her e-voucher for an "official ticket," either at the games themselves, or at a Kiostix ticket box in Pejaten, South Jakarta. She arrived at the ticket box in the midst of all the ticketing confusion and found a process plagued by long lines and printing problems.

“It wasn’t clear [what they meant about] the ticket exchange,” Adelia said. “The organizers didn’t give us any information. There were no clues or clear information, and the queues were really long.”

After waiting in line for four hours, Adelia finally got to exchange her e-voucher for a ticket. But what she got instead was a piece of paper with a handwritten seat number on it.

“The ticket to a night market actually looks better," she said. "It looks more official. Meanwhile this is hand-written, and I’m just not sure if this is official."

At least she got a ticket. Christian Budi tried to get tickets online, then in-person at the Games. Both times he failed. He considered buying a ticket from a scalper, but the prices—Rp 800,000 per-ticket or $54 USD—were insane.

“Maybe I wasn’t fast enough, or I was just unlucky, the tickets sold out really quickly,” Christian said. “I prepared everything, you know. But still I couldn’t get a ticket. There were server problems on Kiostix."

He had to stream the matches at home instead.

Indonesia still suffers from serious problems with elitism and entitlement. Every few months another over-privileged, so-called "elite" makes headlines with some shockingly shitty behavior they feel is totally justified. Sometimes it's slapping security staff at the airport for having to walk through a metal detector (the nerve!), or pulling a gun on someone because they were asked to pay to park their car (the audacity!), or kicking someone because they were told they couldn't cut the line to get gas just because they're in uniform ("do you know who I am?!).

Basically, important people believe they deserve VIP treatment wherever they go, even if that means getting a bunch of tickets to Games events they have no intentions of attending.

M. Danny Buldansyah, the Games organizer's director of media and public relations, tried to downplay the claims that too many tickets were handed out to VIPs by saying that every event was legitimately sold-out, regardless of how it looked on TV.

"Empty seats don’t mean it’s not sold,” Danny told VICE. “Say, the Japanese delegates got 200 tickets for its committee, but some of them didn’t come to watch the match. It’s completely beyond our expectations. We invited state and foreign officials, and a lot of them didn’t come to the match.”

Sure, the organizers can't predict how many of these VIPs won't show, so it's hard to keep the empty seats off the live stream when no one shows up to claim their tickets. But maybe they just could've not handed out so many VIP tickets in the first place, the OCA argued in its letter. Or made them available to actual fans after it was clear no one was going to show up and claim their seats.

“If the VIP seats are vacant, they should just give it to people who really want to watch the game,” Adelia said.

Because in an international sporting event line this, where athletes and countries are judged by their skills and talents and not who they know or how much money they have, shouldn't the fans be given the same equal playing field? Isn't it a bit unfair that some people get the Gold (the ticket in this analogy) just because they know the right people?