GAMES OUT OF REACH
Fears growing that a rescheduled 2021 Tokyo Olympics may not take place at all
“We’ve athletes coming from 206 nations”
“It goes against everything that we stand for”
CONTEMPLATING the possibility of another Olympic delay will test the fortitude of the flintiest athlete. For weeks, their redoubtable spirit has been detectable as a parade of competitors declare they have made peace with the postponement of the Games until next year.
Targets re-set, they were determined to go again.
Now, though, as they start tentative preparations for July 2021, athletes in this country and around the world must figure with the news of recent days that has seen senior figures within the Olympic movement and outside it, wonder if it will be possible to host the Games at all.
This is in light of the growing recognition that social distancing is going to be a strict requirement for months to come, and the realisation that hopes for a vaccine saving the day are tenuous.
If one can be developed successfully, it could be years away. The uncertainty would addle the head of the toughest sportsperson.
It started at the end of April when Shinzo Abe, Japan’s prime minister, said the determination of his country to hold the Olympics is entirely dependent upon successful efforts to halt the pandemic.
‘It would be impossible to hold the Games in such a complete form unless the coronavirus pandemic is contained,’ said Abe, before figures in both the International Olympic Committee and the Tokyo organising committee said there was no back-up plan now: if the 2021 dates are not met, then cancellation is the only option.
Thomas Bach, the IOC president, acknowledged those comments in an interview with the BBC in recent days, but it is comments since then that have illustrated how serious this issue has become.
The intervention of John Coates on Friday was important.
Coates is the president of the Australian Olympic Committee and is a former IOC vice-president.
In the dreary-seeming but influential world of sporting politics, Coates is a very important figure.
His comments on the difficulties confronting a rescheduled Olympics are relevant, and echo a fear that has been intermittently expressed since the Games were rescheduled in March.
‘We’ve got real problems because we’ve got athletes having to come from 206 different nations,’ Coates told the Australian media.
‘(On Thursday) there were 10,000 new cases in Brazil. Very few countries are as advanced in coping with this as (Australia).
‘Prime Minister Abe (the Japanese premier) says the Games can only happen in 2021. We can’t postpone it again and we have to assume that there won’t be a vaccine or, if there is a vaccine, it won’t be sufficient to share around the world.’
His last point looks a realistic one, and in the absence of a vaccine, it seems improbable to imagine any country welcoming people from all over the world as they pour into one city for at least a fortnight – even a city desperate for the prestige of hosting the Olympics. Abe has said that July 2021 is the ‘last option’ his country will entertain, meaning if it does not go ahead then the event will be cancelled and the world will have to wait until 2024 for the next Games, due to be hosted by Paris.
Bach sympathised with that opinion. ‘We have established one principle: to organise these Games in a safe environment for all the participants,’ he told the BBC on Thursday night. Nobody knows what the world will look like in one year, in two months.
‘So we have to rely on (scientific and medical expertise) and then take the appropriate decision at the appropriate time based on this advice.’
This, inevitably, brings up social distancing, an intractable problem that in this case cannot be solved by holding events in empty stadia.
Before the Games were postponed in March, holding them this year but with spectators excluded was mooted – and quickly, if anonymously, rejected. ‘It would go against everything we stand for,’ one IOC source was quoted.
‘The Olympics is more than just a series of competitions, it is about bringing everyone together to celebrate sport.’
That sentiment can be too syrupy to stomach, particularly when the scandals that have beset the Olympic movement are recalled, but it is true to say that its power resides in large part in the spectacle of athletes coming from all over the globe and competing in one place, in a city made dizzy by the enormity of it all, while half the globe watches on television.
The phenomenon is reduced to a husk if held in empty venues.
The Japanese organisers are not definitively ruling it out – unsurprising, given their desperation to be hosts and the fact that even if the Games are cancelled, it will still cost Tokyo billions.
The head of the organising committee, Toshiro Muto, said on
Friday that it was too soon to talk about behind-closed-doors possibilities – but he did not reject them.
Neither, it should be said, did Bach, but the latter acknowledged it would go against the Olympic spirit. Plenty has, of course, and so it cannot be entirely dismissed. As well as diminishing the competition, though, holding the Games with no fans would not solve the enormous issues around athletes.
Its global power is a boast the IOC is never slow to make, but that strength is a terrible weakness in a world laid low by the measures needed to fight a pandemic.
Travel has been largely grounded for months, and when it does resume it is going be limited and it will involve strict measures at airports, and possibly lengthy spells in quarantine outside them.
That puts a strain on athletes trying to qualify for the Games, let alone requiring them to arrive in Tokyo weeks ahead of the event itself.
How sports will hold qualifying events in the coming months remains a big problem, for instance.
Then there is the misery wreaked across America by Covid-19 and the pathetic response of the White House; the US is the most important country to the Olympic movement, but it has failed to lead the world over the past two months and cannot be counted on to provide any leadership as efforts are made to ensure the Games go ahead next summer.
The re-election of a president that relies on racism and nativism and has insisted on calling the virus the ‘Chinese virus’ would be staggeringly bad news on many levels.
One of them would certainly relate to the Olympics; it is difficult to imagine Donald Trump embracing the Olympic ideals and inspiring the effort needed to see the Games going ahead.
He is one absurd obstacle, but the fact is there are many more.
Fourteen months out, the fate of the 32nd summer Olympics is plunged into uncertainty again.