With less than a fortnight to go before the Commonwealth Games open in Delhi, organisers face protests over the state of accommodation as a bridge collapses and three English athletes pull out.
At least 19 people were injured when a foot bridge collapsed near the Jawaharlal Nehru stadium, which is due to stage many of the main events at next month’s games.
Concerns have already been raised over the state of the athletes’ village with questions being asked over whether the games should go ahead. Channel 4 News has discovered that many of the hotels and guest houses which had expected an influx of visitors to watch the competition are yet to receive any bookings.
Athletes are due to start moving into the accommodation on Thursday but when officials from Team Scotland arrived to check their rooms they said they were “unsafe and unfit for human habitation”.
They claimed: “Building works had fallen seriously behind schedule and our allocated accommodation blocks were far from finished”.
They were moved to an accommodation block that had been completed but said in a statement they still had to “clean the seven-storey tower block from top to bottom themselves with assistance from Delhi Games volunteers”.
The England team said they were optimistic that the Games will go ahead, but a lot needed to be done in the Village “with some urgency”.
Athletes pull out
Concerns over the state of facilities came as three English athletes pulled out of the tournament.
Phillips Idowu, Christine Ohuruogu and Lisa Dobriskey were due to defend their Commonwealth titles at the games but will now not compete.
It is not clear at this stage why world triple jump champion Idowu has withdrawn, but Ohuruogu and Dobriskey both have injury concerns.
The President of the Commonwealth Games Federation, Michael Fennell has written to the Indian Cabinet Secretary to stress that the Commonwealth Games Village is “seriously compromised” and that, despite attempts by advance parties of participating teams to work to resolve the issues “significant operational matters remain unaddressed”.
He says the problems are due to deadlines for the site’s completion being moved and added: “Now the high security around the site, while vital, is slowing progress and complicating solutions.”
He is due to inspect the site himself at the earliest opportunity and give a “frank assessment of the situation” to member countries.
Having previously warned that the games could be in jeopardy if the accommodation wasn’t ready, the head of the New Zealand team David Currie has told a news conference: “We are not saying we are not coming. What we are saying is that the Organising Committee has some serious challenges that are to be overcome.”
The Games are due to run from 3-14 October, with the athletes’ village supposed to be designed to hold up to 8,500 team members. But the Times of India reported today that only around half of the 34 residential towers were completed.
On Sunday, a bus carrying Taiwanese tourists was shot at in New Delhi and recent Foreign Office travel advice warns that there is a high threat of terrorism throughout India, with recent attacks targeting public places including those visited by foreigners.
The sports journalist Mihir Bose told Channel 4 News that the problems and the pullouts represented a “grave failure” for India, which wanted to show it could match China in staging big sporting events.
But he said the people running sport in India – other than cricket – were largely low-level bureaucrats and politicians.
“Indians are not really interested in sport, they don’t organise things very well and they are resistant to long-term planning,” he said.