Bali Withdraws from Becoming Host of the 2023 World Beach Games, Menpora Denies Undiluted Budget

– The Minister of Youth and Sports, Dito Ariotedjo dismissed the issue of Bali’s withdrawal from hosting the 2023 ANOC World Beach Games (AWBG) due to the undisbursed preparatory budget.

Previously the AWBG was planned to take place in Bali on August 5-12. However, a month before the event, the organizer of the beach sports announced that the AWBG was canceled because Bali withdrew as host.

“Regarding AWBG, we just received information today that it has been officially canceled from ANOC. This is based on an assessment of NOC Indonesia’s readiness which states that there may be various things and technical considerations that they think are not good. So NOC Indonesia decided to cancel the mechanism, ” said Dito, Wednesday (5/7/2023).

According to him, Bali’s unpreparedness as the host was not due to the government’s budget not coming down.

However, it was more due to a miscommunication between the amount of the budget prepared and the expectations of the organizers, causing discrepancies and the impression that the budget was not liquid.

“Actually, if the budget mechanism is based on information from the Ministry of Finance, there is indeed a range of differences between expectations and calculations of what will be assisted by the government and sponsors. So there are indeed differences there which caused a long discussion yesterday. But since I became Menpora, we have conducted a review between Kemenpora, organizers, NOC, DJA and BPKP, while yesterday the proposal was IDR 446 billion,” he explained.

This, according to Dito, made the organizers decide to cancel the activity because they considered that the budget was insufficient and worried that this would affect Indonesia’s image as the executor.

“In terms of the impact of the cancellation, we are still asking the NOC to provide us with information about the impact that will be experienced by Indonesia, especially the sports federation. As we know, this activity is an activity that non-olympics number. So this is outside of the IOC. That’s why I asked for a report on how it impacts,” he continued.

Considering that the cancellation had been officially announced, Dito ensured that it would be impossible for this beach sports activity to continue.

“Because this has been officially submitted to ANOC, it seems that there is no chance for it to continue. So now we will still be waiting for whether there is a lawsuit or not. That’s why I asked to see first, how the progress of NOC Indonesia,” said the Menpora.

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