A week before the opening ceremony of the 26th Southeast Asian (SEA) Games, organizers are still working to finalize the construction of venues in the host cities of Palembang and Jakarta. Many test events have been delayed due to slow preparation. The Jakarta Post's Agnes Winarti and Niken Prathivi explore the issue and look at how the nation is preparing to host the prestigious biennial Games.
Rome was not built overnight, nor were any great venues or buildings, but Indonesia seems to be ignoring this saying, and perhaps attempting to reenact a Javanese legend in which a prince named Bandung Bondowoso builds 999 temples overnight for a beautiful princess he plans to marry.
The decision on Indonesia being the host of the 26th Southeast Asian (SEA) Games was made by the SEA Games Federation Council meeting in Bangkok back in September 2006. But with only weeks left before the official opening of the biennial games, the two host cities, Jakarta and Palembang, are still struggling to complete the rehabilitation and construction of venues, among a long list of unfinished preparations for the games. Indonesia should be highly experienced since it has already hosted the games thrice – in 1997, 1987 and 1979.
Jakarta has been declared the venue for dragon boat races, rowing and canoe-kayaking events but many observers have expressed doubts that the remote Cipule Lake in Mulyasari village, West Java, will be ready on time.
This is one of the worst-prepared venues for the games. After a series of delays in construction and equipment supplies, the Cipule site developer announced on Monday it would only provide a tent for spectators instead of a permanent structure it had started build around two months ago.
The 20x8-meter tent will be installed two or three days before the games, venue supervisor Irwan Setiawan said on Monday as quoted by Antara state news wire.
With the canoeing competition set to be held from Nov. 10 to 13, rowing from Nov. 14 to 17, and dragon boat races from Nov. 18 to 21, the developer is also speeding up its efforts to finish a doping control room, press room and a room for the sport federations, which are all said to be less than 70 percent complete.
A knock-down starting-tower has just been completed, but five finishing towers are still only at the foundation stage. The five finishing towers are planned to be erected at 500 meters, 1,000 meters, 1,500 meters and 2,000 meters from the starting tower, representing the number of events in rowing, canoeing and dragon boat races.
In mid September, The Jakarta Post observed that the 54.1 hectare site looked more like a vacant lot than an international-standard rowing area, aside from the lake itself, which is around three kilometers long and 200 meters wide.
Because it is situated 60 kilometers east of Jakarta, work on the Cipule site is not being managed by a single agency, which has apparently complicated the process. The Jakarta Sports Agency is in charge of the construction of a boat house and the finishing tower; the Sports Ministry is responsible for building the rowing tracks and the boat docks; and the Public Works Ministry is responsible for dredging the lake, building an entrance road and providing clean water facilities.
For this work, the Public Works Ministry has allocated Rp 10,997,682,000 from the state budget, the Sports Ministry has provided Rp 11,232,209,800 and the Jakarta Sports Agency has also contributed at least Rp 4 billion.
But the government has yet to finish several major aspects of the project, including the entrance road to the location, and dredging. While 11 kilometers of the entrance road has been asphalted, about two-and-a-half kilometers was still being repaired as of mid-September.
Irwan Setiawan, the Indonesian Rowing Association (PODSI) field manager, overseeing the ongoing preparations at the venue, told The Jakarta Post on Sunday that the two-and-a-half kilometer section had been cemented and another 100 meters was expected to be finished on time.
Since the venue is barren and will likely be very hot in clear weather conditions, the government is making a last-minute effort to plant trees to make it cooler.
"Planting 1,000 trees here is not enough. It should have been 5,000," Public Works Minister Djoko Kirmanto said during a field trip to the site in September. But until last week no further planting had taken place and seedlings provided by the Agriculture Ministry were still being nursed at local residents' houses.
Despite the plan to use Cipule Lake as a SEA Games venue being unveiled in April, a large sign near the site entrance shows that the Sports and Youth Affairs Ministry only commenced its Cipule Rowing Arena project on Aug. 10, and targets to complete it on Nov. 7 – just three days before the planned kayak and canoeing qualification rounds on Nov. 10.
Meanwhile, work to increase the water depth for the 2,000-meter and 1,000-meter rowing lanes only began in September.
The erection of the piling stage for the participants' dining and resting hall and the three-storey finishing tower only began in late August. And by mid-September, only minor progress had been made to the constructions of boat houses, which were only half complete. "If they don't speed up, I don't know if it will be done on time," PODSI chairman Achmad Sutjipto said on the sidelines of the public works minister's inspection last month.
It seems he was right. Until last Thursday, the dredging of the lake had not been completed.
Dragon boat national team manager Mardinal Djamaluddin said there were too many variations in the depth of the water in the racing lanes. The ideal water depth benefits the rowers' speed performance, he said.
"The first 1,000 meters of the track are already more than four meters deep, but the depth of the next 1,000 meters varies, with some parts only 1.5 meters deep. We still need to add more water to raise the surface level," Mardinal told the Post on Thursday, adding that the entire lane should have been 2.5 meters deep.
Equipment for the rowing lanes, including docks, pontoons and floating balls, which were imported from South Korea, are also expected to arrive at the last minute.
After being detained at the customs office in Tanjung Priok, North Jakarta, for several weeks, the imported equipment has been cleared and arrived in 12 truck containers at the site on Thursday, waiting for immediate installation the next day.
Somewhat better progress has been made in the cycling venues with all being finished by September, but with no room for error.
"All venues for track in Velodrome Ramawangun [East Jakarta], BMX in Ancol [North Jakarta], MTB events in Sentul as well as the road race in Subang [West Java] are set, at least in theory," the venues coordinator for cycling Tino Latuheru told the Post in September.
Tino added that the velodrome would request the world's governing cycling federation, UCI, to conduct a homologation (an official approval) of the track to make sure it qualified for an international event, but the Indonesian Cycling Association (ISSI) chief Phanny Tanjung told the Post recently that there would be no homologation test of the velodrome prior to the SEA Games.
"We are not ready if the UCI says we have to make more adjustments. We don't have that much time to make renovations of velodrome's track," said Phanny.
No homologation test means that any record-breaking results during the Games will only be recognized by the SEA Games Federation. UCI will not recognize them in an absence of a homologation test. "We are planning to invite UCI for the test after the Games, maybe in December."