Day 13 — The Backside of International Sports Competitions

As you know, the Tokyo Olympics and Paralympics were originally planned to be held this year, 2020. Hopefully, we will be able to welcome people from all over the world to Tokyo next year. Although no one knows how it will go under this situation, I can assure you that all athletes and staff will show us their best performances even if the games are held with no spectators. Sports have the power to encourage people and leave great memories.

I am just a salesperson working for HENNGE, which means I’m not the person most concerned about the Olympics at all. So, I can’t tell you how it will go in detail or explain how important it is for Japan on social aspects. However, I have certain experiences related to sports events, which others usually don’t have, because I worked for some successful international sports competitions as a travel agent for over 6 years. Let me introduce the backside of international sports competitions from my experiences.

First, the main work of the travel agencies is to arrange transportation and accommodation and meals as you may know. Usually, the sports national federation hosting the event will make orders to travel agencies to organize the details when the international competition will be held. Therefore, organizers can focus on the management of this kind of big event. I luckily went through the process as the main member in charge of one of such events.

In my opinion, the big difference between traveling for sports and normal traveling is the purpose of coming to Japan. Athletes want to win the competition, not to enjoy Japan. So, we had to be attentive to them during their stay from arrival to departure. I’ll use an actual example: an international sports competition in Japan of a team sport that hosted 24 national teams.

1. Arrival

As all national teams had to shoulder their own flight tickets' expenses, they arranged it by themselves. Some teams couldn’t prepare the suit flight, because the venues were not only in big cities like Tokyo and Osaka but in other smaller cities too. But we had to plan the transportation accordingly to their flights, considering the athletes’ conditions and bus drivers’ working times and check-in times to the hotels and so on. Our guests are not only teams but also officials (including referees, supervisors, the presidents of the international federation — their requests were sometimes more intense, but I won’t describe them here).

2. Schedules

Even though the start day and time of the games and official training schedules are fixed in advance, most teams want to be more flexible, and they give us their requests on what they want to do. For example, they want to choose what time they eat, have a team meeting, do additional training, or do regular laundry. But as the host country, we occasionally have to say “No” to the teams, taking into consideration equality between teams and the venues' capacity according to the regulations.

3. Meals

For athletes, gaining the right nutrition is much more important than we imagine. Moreover, some of them have specific dietary requirements, such as vegetarian or gluten-free. If it was normal traveling, we could serve delicious local meals. To meet the high standards of athletes’ diets, we have to cooperate with hotel staff because meals might affect their performance. For instance, teams take the below arrangements for granted.

• Water: room temperature, separated from ice
• Milk: low fat
• Pasta: plain, separated from sauce, at least 2 kinds of sauce
• Bread: whole wheat is better
• Meat: separated from sauce, and so on

4. Departure

According to the regulations, teams have to leave the official hotel the next day either after they lose or it is decided they can’t advance to the next stage. If they want to stay longer, they have to pay by themselves. Since the games usually took place at night, we needed to prepare for teams’ departures from the hotel to the airport based on the results. It’s necessary to anticipate which teams will have to leave, but sometimes, they go against our predictions. Of course, if we’re just spectators, that’s the best part of sports. I hope you can imagine how stressful it is for the organizers!

I learned many things by going through these experiences, although I can’t express them all here. Looking back on the days, I realized it’s important to be flexible and stay calm no matter what happens.

I’m glad if you look forward to the coming Olympics and imagine that many people are working hard behind the scene.

This article is part of the HENNGE Advent Calendar 2020. An Advent calendar is a special calendar used for counting down the days till Christmas. HENNGE Advent Calendar 2020 presents one article by one HENNGE member per day for 25 days until Christmas, 2020.