WHILE I am proud as a Singaporean that Singapore is hosting the inaugural Asian Youth Games (AYG), I cannot help but feel that the organisation of the Games needs improvement.

I'm certain many Singaporeans are disappointed as are many of my foreign friends who came here just to watch the Games.

First, the official website is unprofessional, provides scanty details and misses even fundamental ones like a properly updated medal tally.

My foreign friends tell me that they could not instantly ascertain the medal winners from the medal tally chart and had to painstakingly check each result slip to find out the individual medal winners for each country.

There were also abrupt changes in telecast - for instance, on Channel 4 on Wednesday, table tennis was shown in place of beach volleyball without any prior warning to viewers. The coverage of shooting was also poor.

Viewers had to squint to follow zoomed-in results on live screens at the shooting venue, as they were not given easy-to-follow graphics showing the shooters' official scores.

There was no information on country-to-country match-ups until it was too late.

This meant that fans overseas could not buy tickets in advance to support their teams as they do not know when their teams will play.

In the daily highlights, there was no mention of Singapore's bowling gold medal winners, frustrating many fans who stayed up late to view the 11pm telecast and share the glory of our bowlers.

The telecast of swimming was also disastrous with the camera zooming out as Lynette Lim won the gold, leaving viewers to wonder who finished second and third.

The broadcaster interrupted several national anthems with strange pre-recorded music.

Most disappointing of all, there were several unannounced changes to the Games schedule.

For example, a couple of foreign friends and I bought tickets to the women's beach volleyball quarter-final matches, which was scheduled to be held today but was suddenly switched to yesterday.

Ticket holders were not informed by the organisers and knew of the changes only when they checked the website a few hours before the event. There was no information on how to obtain refunds.

I hope the organisers of next year's Youth Olympic Games will learn from the mistakes made during these Games.

Robin Chee

This article was first published in The Straits Times.