The “megacity” title is just a marketing ploy since neither of our metro areas meet the actual definition for megacities.
Okay, so what IS Chungcheong? (click me!)
Chungcheong is actually the name of a historic province way back when the Korean peninsula was ruled as one, unified kingdom. The venues for the Korean bid are actually spread out over two provinces and two autonomous cities, some of which are poorly connected to each other.
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Sejong is a new planned city that’s intended to be the new administrative capital of South Korea. Among other fundamental flaws, it’s also still being built and is surrounded by mountains on all sides.
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Daejeon is a more established city 17mi to the south. It has a subway line that connects several key venues including the World Cup Stadium and one of several swimming venues, high-speed rail service to Seoul, and express buses to Incheon Airport.
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Cheongju is 16 miles to the east of Sejong, and is a provincial capital that’s a home to a few universities. They’ll tell you they have a direct train line to “Sejong”, except you still need to cross a mountain by BRT before you actually get there.
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Finally, Cheonan is 22 miles north of Sejong. They’re a major city with lots of colleges and tourist spots that exploded in population in the mid-late 20th century. They’re also served by high-speed rail and a subway/suburban rail line that goes straight to Seoul.
The Korean bid committee’s trying to collect 1 million signatures from people supporting the bid. This sounds very ambitious -until you realize the region’s four volunteer service centers have over 1.5 million members combined. So local and national support could be an advantage for them.
Still, it seems like the Koreans think we’d be tough to beat since we’d get to act as a pregame for the LA Olympics in 2028. We may also not be at a big disadvantage for hotels, since Daejeon, one of the two autonomous cities, is said to have about 1,800 hotel rooms. Assuming similar rates for other big cities in the area, it sounds like Chungcheong may need to work on building more visitor and athlete lodging as well. We may be at an advantage when it comes to transportation as well for the same reason.
EDIT: The TBJ has an article about this now, too! Turns out, the Olympic Festival that the Triangle hosted in 1987 had over 464k visitors -and our bid’s lead organizer thinks the World University Games could bring about 600,000 visitors to the Triangle!