In my opinion, IOI 2025 has been one of the worst run IOIs. Here is my personal experience of the issues as a (Deputy) Leader that I felt/heard at IOI 2025 from other leaders/contestants. I will attempt to stick to a somewhat chronological order when talking about these issues, but this might be easier said than done. This blog is the first part of a series of three blogs, highlighting things that went wrong at IOI. There will also be another blog highlighting the positives of this IOI.

This blog will contain parts describing the food and opening ceremony.

There were pretty bad issues with the food available. Our contestants did not get enough breakfast during the second day because they ran out of scrambled eggs. As a result, two of my contestants that were muslim could only eat bread. The other two non-muslim contestants could only eat bread and ham. The breakfast available for both the contestants and leaders is quite appalling, especially for people from countries where eating only bread, eggs, and ham is common. The breakfast available never changed and eating the same breakfast for 8 (+ 3 days in my team's case) was not very pleasant. It would be nice if the organizers tried to accommodate more people and have protein other than eggs and ham, maybe chicken or something else.

Compared to the breakfast, the lunch and dinner were better but still bad. One of the things I found really weird at this IOI was that all the lunches and dinners were not a buffet. As someone that now lives in Canada, I find the portion sizes in Bolivia quite small. As a result, I often feel quite hungry between meals (especially lunch and dinner) or late at night. From all other events that I have attended over the years (both national and international) I feel that this is quite a weird thing to have. It is usually easier to have a buffer with several options to account for dietary restrictions that people might have.

There were a lot of issues with dietary restrictions in the first/second day. My team leader has a halal dietary restriction but somehow the restaurants gave me the tag for the dietary restriction instead, which I subsequently gave to my team leader. At the first/second day, everyone with halal dietary restriction was given vegetarian food. This is technically halal, but it is still a very lazy way of handling this particular dietary restriction. Eventually, after some advice from my team leader in Matrix (and numerous complaints from other team leaders), they provided more proper halal meals using seafood, etc. Other than halal, they also didn't know what gluten-free meant, so initially there was quite a lot of confusion about that.

Continuing later on the second day, there were a lot of issues with the opening ceremony. Firstly, the opening ceremony livestream was only available on Facebook. I mean, who even uses facebook as a platform to livestream? Maybe I'm just a zoomer that doesn't use facebook but I still feel that the standard for IOI should always be livestreams on Youtube (as per the precedent set since 2021, or earlier, not sure). Second, the leaders and participants were separated during the opening ceremony for no clear reason. It would make sense if there was a space restriction that caused the leaders and participants to be separated, but that didn't seem to be the case, as the leaders/participants were sitting in the same area, just separately.

There was a lot of abnormalities in the opening ceremony itself. For one, most of the opening ceremony was in Spanish, so it was very difficult to understand what was going on. Translation devices were only provided to leaders if we gave them some form of ID/Credit Card (initially it was the same for participants, but after a brief argument they gave them to participants without need for any ID).

During the part of the opening ceremony where every country is called, there were several issues that were faced. For one, the camera was blocked by a pole when spotlighting the UK team. Other than that, for some reason the host decided to call all the countries a second time for no clear reason. It was clear that during the first round of mentioning all the countries, they mixed up some of them (this is bad but still somewhat understandable). It was very awkward when this happened as everyone was quite tired and hungry and we all didn't understand what was going on.

Hopefully, future IOIs can accommodate various dietary restrictions (halal, vegetarian, gluten-free, etc) and allergies better. Furhtermore, the opening ceremony should be well-rehearsed in an attempt to make it smoother and less awkward for everyone involved.

P.S. I am not calling out the IOI at all, I know that they can't fully control the hosts and they try their best to ensure that the hosts will do things correctly. This is just a personal rant/blog.