The Olympics can’t go on. They would be a Games of fear... not of celebration
AT THE Olympic Museum in Tokyo, in the shadow of the beautiful new Olympic Stadium, there is an exhibition dedicated to the 1964 Games, when the Japanese capital became the first Asian city to stage the festival of sport. The Olympics marked Japan’s re-emergence into the world after its role in the horrors of the Second World War.
The photographs on the walls are moving and inspiring, particularly the one that shows thousands of people lining the streets as the Olympic flame is carried through the ruins of Hiroshima. The Games became a symbol of reconciliation and togetherness. They epitomised what the Olympics is supposed to be about. They brought the world together through sport.
Last week, I saw a new set of pictures from Japan. They showed the Olympic flame arriving in Japan on a flight from Athens at the Matsushima defence force base on Friday. ‘The Olympic cauldron was lit in a small ceremony without a crowd, amid coronavirus fears,’ the report of the ceremony said. There was no sense of celebration. It felt almost like a surreptitious act.
There had been plans, apparently, for hundreds of local schoolchildren to attend. They were called off. And now that the torch relay is beginning, organisers and local authorities have urged those who had been planning to come out on to the streets to applaud it to stay at home instead.
And still the IOC and the local organising committee are desperately trying to maintain a united front by insisting that the Olympics will go ahead as planned, that the flame will be lit in that beautiful stadium on Friday July 24 and that a spectacle can still be salvaged from the chaos and suffering of coronavirus.
Is that what we really want? Is that really what Tokyo wants? Is that what the Japanese people want? Is it what anybody who loves the Olympics wants?
Because what we are talking about staging here is a kind of shadow Olympics. An
Olympics that will be more in shade than in sunlight.
An Olympics of fear, not of exultation.
That is what will happen if the IOC presses on with its plan to stage the Games and says to hell with what the rest of the world is doing to try to thwart Covid-19. It may be that Japan has the outbreak under control by this summer but it is fanciful in the extreme to think that every other country will have.
Part of the point of the Olympics is that it is a world jamboree. It brings people together from all the different corners of the planet. In the age of the new coronavirus, that means, sadly, that if the Olympics do go ahead this summer, the Games may double as the perfect breeding ground for a second wave of infections. What an Olympic legacy that would be.
That is before we even start on the preparations of the athletes. As we go into lockdown, how can we expect athletes to be ready for July 24? Training centres are being shut down, running tracks are closing, gyms are shut, social distancing is seen as vitally important. Olympic athletes do not exist in a vacuum. They cannot ignore the rules the rest of the population have to abide by. That would endanger their own health and the health of their loved ones, not to mention the health of the public. Katarina JohnsonThompson is just one of the athletes who articulated those concerns perfectly when she said that training had become ‘impossible’. The reality is that athletes cannot train properly and, if they cannot train properly, how is it fair to ask them to compete in July? It would be totally wrong.
There are signs that the message is beginning to seep through. Lord Coe said yesterday that a decision would be made soon on whether the Games go ahead. ‘The issue of competition fairness is paramount,’ he said, recognising athletes were struggling to train in some countries due to measures put in place to reduce the spread of coronavirus. ‘If we lose the level playing field, then we lose the integrity of the competition.’
It has got to the point where the only thing stopping the postponement of the Games is money. Money always gets in the way in modern sport. So last week Lord Coe was talking about athletes’ earnings and the IOC was thinking about its television deals and Japan was thinking about the huge financial outlay it has made on infrastructure. Unfortunately for them, Covid-19 does not appear to care quite as much about money as they do.
This might be counterintuitive for a powerful sporting body such as the IOC or FIFA but Covid-19 will not respond to the conventional methods of persuasion that have served these bodies well in the past: you cannot offer it financial inducements or a designer handbag for its wife or state honours. You cannot do anything to get its vote.
Fortunately, more and more people with strong voices are cutting through the self-interest. Current athletes, ex-athletes, administrators and responsible, well-run organisations such as the BOA are breaking ranks and voicing concerns about the IOC’s head-in-the-sand approach.
Yesterday, the US track federation added its name to a swelling chorus of calls to postpone the Games. USA Swimming has already asked for the same thing. Brazil’s Olympic Committee is of the same mind. The objections are close to reaching a critical mass.
‘The instinct to keep safe (not to mention obey government instructions to lockdown) is not compatible with training, travel and focus that a looming Olympics demands of athletes, spectators and organisers,’ British four-time Olympic gold medallist Sir Matthew Pinsent wrote in a response to IOC president Thomas Bach. ‘Keep them safe. Call it off.’
There may indeed be, as IOC member Sir Craig Reedie pointed out, ‘spectacular difficulties’ in moving the Games to later in the year or next summer, but Reedie is a man never knowingly anything other than tone-deaf in his pronouncements and he has got this wrong, too. If UEFA can reschedule Euro 2020, if the Masters can be moved, if the Premier League can be suspended, then the Olympics can do it, too.
If it were rescheduled for the summer of 2021, there is a good chance that a Tokyo Olympics might once again come to be seen as a symbol of joy and release after a period of global suffering just as it was in 1964.
That would lead to a clash with the World Athletics Championship in Eugene, Oregon, otherwise known as Niketown. That, presumably, is another reason the IOC are fighting shy of moving the Games to next summer. Nike would not be happy and in athletics, what Nike wants, Nike usually gets.
But imagine the emotions an Olympics a little over a year from now might unlock. Imagine the celebration of the human spirit it could unleash if the world is emerging into the sunlight again.
Instead of the shadow Olympics it will be if it is staged this summer, instead of the pale Olympics, the scared Olympics, the cautious Olympics, the hand-sanitiser Olympics, it could be the best Games ever. It just needs the IOC to have the vision and the courage to do it.
For everyone’s sake, it is time to do the right thing. It is time to call off the Olympic Games.
UEFA insisted n last week that the European Championship, now scheduled to take place in 2021, would still be known as Euro 2020. Sometimes, the lengths modern sport will go to in order to prioritise merchandising and preserve products already made are so absurd they are hilarious.