In 2021, Papua hosted Indonesia’s National Games—PON XX.
For a few weeks, Papua possessed what appeared to be a magnificent new sporting landscape: an international-standard stadium, an aquatic centre, indoor arenas, shooting facilities, hockey pitches, cricket grounds and other specialist venues. Billions of rupiah had been invested. The facilities looked impressive, the opening ceremony was spectacular, and Papua demonstrated that it could host a major national sporting event.
Five years later, the uncomfortable question is no longer whether Papua could host PON.
It did.
The question is why so many facilities were built without first establishing who would use them, who would manage them and who would pay to maintain them after the Games had gone.
The lesson from Doyo Baru
Our efforts to reactivate the hockey and cricket complex at Doyo Baru reveal the problem in its starkest form.
Only six weeks ago, we believed that parts of the complex could still be brought back into community use through a relatively simple programme of cleaning, minor repairs, improved security and regular sporting activity.
The intention was practical. We were not proposing another expensive government programme. We wanted to establish a multisport and recreation centre that would bring local children, schools, clubs, families and traditional landowners into the facility. Regular activity would create a reason to protect it.
However, within those six weeks, further vandalism and deliberate destruction rendered important sections of the complex unsuitable for community use. Electrical fittings, plumbing, doors, ceilings and other infrastructure had been damaged or removed. A facility built to international competition standards had deteriorated to the point where considerable public expenditure would again be required merely to make it functional.
This was not deterioration caused by decades of use.
It was deterioration caused largely by the absence of use, ownership, security and management.
The Doyo Baru complex—including its hockey and cricket facilities—was developed as part of the considerable public investment required for PON XX. Official government reporting before the Games highlighted not only the venues themselves but substantial supporting works around the precinct. Yet there appears to have been no adequately funded and operational post-Games system capable of converting those venues into everyday sporting assets. Indonesian Cabinet Secretariat, Ministry of Public Works and Housing
Papua now possesses facilities designed for competitions that seldom occur, operated by organisations with limited resources and located within a sporting system that does not yet generate enough regular participation, clubs, competitions, coaches, officials or revenue to sustain them.
That is not sport development. It is event construction.
Papua is not alone
The ruins left by major sporting events can be found around the world.
Athens hosted the Olympic Games in 2004. The Games produced several outstanding venues, but too many were developed without viable long-term uses. Specialist facilities later stood fenced off, deteriorating or abandoned. Greece’s subsequent financial crisis made the problem worse, but the underlying weakness existed from the beginning: construction had been treated as the objective, while post-Games operation remained uncertain.
Rio de Janeiro experienced a similar trajectory after the 2016 Olympics. Parts of its Olympic Park struggled to find sustainable uses, while the temporary aquatics venue sat unused, deteriorated and was eventually dismantled. The problem was especially confronting because the expensive Olympic precinct stood beside communities facing serious deficiencies in basic services.
Beijing presents a more complicated picture. Its principal venues—the Bird’s Nest and Water Cube—found tourism, event and recreational uses and were reused when Beijing hosted the 2022 Winter Olympics. Yet some of the more specialised 2008 facilities, including the beach-volleyball and kayaking venues, became underused or deteriorated.
London offers a more positive, although far from perfect, comparison. Before the 2012 Games, planners identified which venues should remain, which should be reduced in size and which should be temporary. The Aquatics Centre’s large temporary seating wings were removed, converting it into a more practical public facility. The temporary water-polo arena was dismantled. The former Olympic Park became part of a wider urban regeneration programme with housing, transport, education, public space and commercial development.
London’s legacy has still been expensive and contested, particularly the conversion and continuing financial arrangements surrounding the Olympic Stadium. Nevertheless, the important principle was understood: the permanent footprint should be determined by long-term demand rather than by the maximum requirements of a two-week event. Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park legacy, London legacy masterplan
The International Olympic Committee reports that most permanent Olympic venues remain in use. That deserves acknowledgement. Photographs of deserted facilities can exaggerate the scale of abandonment by presenting an unused temporary entrance or an obsolete specialist venue as representative of an entire Games.
However, “still in use” is a very low measure of success.
A venue can remain technically operational while requiring large public subsidies, serving very few people or contributing almost nothing to the development of local sport. The more meaningful questions are:
- How frequently is it used?
- Who can afford to use it?
- Does it support schools, clubs and community competitions?
- Is there an identified operator with sufficient staff and income?
- Does it improve participation and athlete development?
- Can the host community maintain it without sacrificing more urgent priorities?
International standards can become a liability
Governments like international-standard facilities because they are visible.
A photograph of a new stadium communicates progress. A ribbon can be cut. Officials can stand in front of it. The cost can be announced as an investment in youth, development and national pride.
Building the sporting system around it is much less visible.
It requires trained coaches, functioning clubs, school competitions, facility managers, groundskeepers, safeguarding procedures, transport, affordable access, equipment, annual calendars and operating budgets. It requires years of patient work. There may be no grand opening ceremony.
Yet this is where sport actually exists.
An international-standard hockey pitch has little value where there are too few hockey clubs to use it. A large stadium does not produce athletics if schools have no regular competitions. A competition swimming pool cannot develop swimmers when ordinary families cannot access it or when the pumps, chemicals, electricity and specialist staff cannot be funded.
The more technically sophisticated the facility, the greater the risk. Specialist surfaces, filtration systems, electronic scoring equipment, lighting, air-conditioning and safety systems require continuing expertise and money. Once routine maintenance stops, deterioration accelerates. Tropical heat, rain and humidity make the process even faster in Papua.
International standards should be applied where sustained international use is genuinely expected. They should not become a substitute for understanding local conditions.
The wrong order of development
The conventional mega-event model follows this sequence:
- Win the right to host an event.
- Build the required facilities.
- Stage the event.
- Search for something to do with the facilities afterwards.
The sequence should be reversed.
A region should first build participation, clubs, competitions, coaching capability and facility management. It should establish what its sporting population uses regularly and can realistically sustain. Only then should it construct the facilities needed to support that activity.
Hosting an event may accelerate an existing development plan. It cannot replace one.
Before any permanent venue is approved, government should be required to identify:
- its principal users after the event;
- the number of days it will be used each year;
- the organisation responsible for operating it;
- a realistic annual maintenance and staffing budget;
- affordable community-access arrangements;
- transport and security requirements;
- the source of operating income;
- and a funded plan covering at least the first ten years.
If those answers do not exist, the venue should be temporary, smaller, adapted from an existing facility or not built at all.
What Papua could have built
Imagine if even part of the money used for highly specialised PON facilities had been invested in simple, durable and accessible sporting infrastructure across Papua.
School and community playing areas could have been upgraded. Local leagues could have received equipment, transport and prize money. Coaches and officials could have been trained. District competitions could have been scheduled annually. Existing facilities could have been staffed and maintained. Young people could have gained regular access to sport close to where they live.
This would not have created the same spectacular television images.
It might, however, have created considerably more sport.
Papua’s tragedy is not simply that public buildings have been allowed to deteriorate. It is that an extraordinary opportunity was lost. The PON investment could have become the foundation of a broad and inclusive sporting system. Instead, much of it was concentrated in facilities whose scale and technical demands exceeded the capacity of the system expected to inherit them.
The empty venues are therefore not monuments to sporting ambition. They are evidence of a planning model that confused hosting sport with developing sport.
The world does not need more international-standard facilities waiting for international events that may never return.
It needs places where people can play today, next week and throughout the next generation.
Build the athletes. Build the clubs. Build the competitions. Build the management capability and the community ownership.
Then—only when there is a demonstrated need—build the stadium.
