I don’t think it was too good to be true. It just didn’t seem as big a deal as the people made it out to be.
And I’m not saying that they were being sponsored. When a camera is rolling, and a reporter asks the question “how do you feel about your experience here?”, naturally the only response they’d get is “I like it here”. That’s the same everywhere. I doubt any athlete would directly say that they hated XXX city they competed in. It’s not logical.
I mean, it’s a sporting event and correct me if I’m wrong, but you aren’t the that into sports? For someone not into sports, I would understand your view on the events.
I understand where you’re coming from, but doesn’t quite matter who watched it or knew of it, Universide or World Student Games, is still the second largest global sporting event under the Olympics and Taiwan hosted it in pretty good fashion.
They wouldn’t directly say it, but ask any athlete or journalist who attended the Sochi Winter Olympics in 2014 and they wouldn’t go as far as directly complimenting the city or the organization 
Soccer World Cup in South Africa was astonishingly bad as well.
I thought the universiade exceeded my expectations offering a rare chance for my family to enjoy some internatonal sports events here and also at reasonable prices.
I think that says more about Russia.
But yeah it’s probably because I tend to not give a tiny fuck about sporting events.
https://topics.amcham.com.tw/2017/10/taiwan-scores-big-as-universiade-host/
Article is a little late, but I think it’s pretty well written.
When Taipei was awarded the 2017 Summer Universiade hosting rights in 2011, it had already unsuccessfully applied to host the event four times before. One of the factors that helped push it past Brasilia this time was tacit support from China, which presumably sought to reward then-president Ma Ying-jeou for embracing the “One China principle.”
Not sure if there’s facts behind this, but…thanks President Ma?
If it was up to Ko, he wouldn’t have hosted the event at all. Ko thought of it as just another mess from the previous administration he had to clean up. He did a hell of a job though.
Good article.