64DANGER ZONE
Ireland’s Olympians are flying into a city clouded in risk and uncertainty and the team’s medical experts are gearing up for ‘unbelievable challenges’
AFTER months of hearing that this will be an Olympics like no other, Irish athletes will soon feel the exhausting truth of that sentiment. They are used to taking precautions before major races and championships. Athletes have always been careful about hygiene, desperate to avoid a head cold or some other virus that could jeopardise their participation.
Competing in the midst of a global pandemic now makes demands of budding Tokyo Olympians that would astonish even their most scrupulous predecessors.
Dr Jim O’Donovan is the chief medical officer with the Olympic Federation of Ireland, and the point man for the exhaustive list of details that need attending as athletes start to depart for pre-Games training camps.
The most important detail surrounds vaccines, and he is confident that Team Ireland will have a vaccination rate of close to 100%.
When athletes do arrive in Japan, they will enjoy nothing like the freedoms those who have competed before them did. Their world will be shrank down to absolute necessities.
First, though, O’Donovan is concerned with getting Team Ireland to Japan safely for the Games which start on Friday week.
And given the anxiety that air travel has caused since the onset of the pandemic, he identifies the actual business of getting from Ireland to Japan as the point of most vulnerability. ‘For 14 days pretravel their health status is being monitored, and this is a Tokyo Organising Committee requirement. They have to check their temperature daily. They have to keep a written record of any symptoms and report any symptoms,’ remarks O’Donovan.
‘Then going through a flight, eight hours in an enclosed space, is probably the highest-risk event for the duration.
‘Coming off the flight, they are immediately tested at the airport and they are in a quasi-quarantine state for about three days afterwards, where they have to limit their contacts with other people.
‘In the Village, there is the dining hall, transport, and room sharing. It’s unavoidable, unfortunately, that we will have to have athletes sharing rooms.
‘We’ve tried to limit that as much as possible, but it’s just a fact of the Games. You have to count in then what the knock-on effect would be from a positive case.
‘We follow the Tokyo Organising Committee recommendations. We have our own personal protective equipment advice, which we’ve developed.
There are different types of masks. We have advised everyone to wear FFP2 masks, which is a higher-level mask, which actually filters some of the air.
‘We have supplied everyone with three of those for each day they are there. They are to use those in areas which are identified as high-risk.’
It was announced by the OFI in February of last year that through an arrangement with Qatar Airways, all athletes will fly business class to Tokyo — a radical departure from the grim days when athletes were herded into steerage, with all the discomfort and potential injury risk inherent in that.
Another factor now is that the Irish team — currently numbering 114, with one last sport, judo, to announce its team tomorrow — will not travel en masse. That is another mitigation against an outbreak that could end the dreams of an entire team. ‘I think we’ve, all in all, 10 individual travelling parties going at different times,’ says O’Donovan. ‘That in itself (ensures) less fallout if there was going to be a case. ‘The worry was if there was a case on a plane, in some circumstances some public health in different jurisdictions have described the whole plane as close contacts.
‘It does appear if that was to happen in Japan, it wouldn’t be the case. They would factor in where you are sitting.
‘Fortunately a lot of our athletes are travelling in business class, and that in itself allows them to socially distance on the plane.
‘They’ve all been advised to wear PPE (personal protective equipment) with visors to protect against spread through the eyes, and also the FFP2 masks would provide further protection if there was a breakout on a plane.’ O’Donovan was a distinguished sportsman, who was on a development contract with Leinster Rugby before starring at midfield on the fine Limerick Gaelic football side of the 2000s and early 2010s that ran Kerry and Cork extremely close in the Munster championship.
He also serves on the GAA Medical and Scientific Committee.
Factor in his day job as a consultant in sport and exercise medicine and his work with the Sport Ireland Institute, and this is someone who understands elite sport, the medical factors involved, but also the prevailing crises in public health management as the world struggles with Covid-19.
His take on travelling to Tokyo for these blighted Games is, then, worth hearing.
‘For me, it’s great to be involved in any Olympic Games, but this Olympic Games has created unbelievable challenges from a medical point of view,’ he says.
‘I would think that up until the point where we were able to access vaccines, I would have been very hesitant about travelling. But we’ve got a pretty much fully-vaccinated team travelling over, which gives me a lot of reassurance.’
Once athletes arrive safely, there are the mental obstacles of preparing to compete in such dislocated times.
Dr Kate Kirby is the Irish team psychologist, and this will be her third Olympics. Her nine-to-five life is as head of performance psychology at the Sport Ireland Institute, and she has been working with ath
letes who had spent years, some most of their lives, preparing for a date in July 2020, only to see the Olympics cancelled last March and put back a year. The disruption that caused depended on the stage of an athlete’s career.
‘The younger athletes who were maybe looking towards Paris (the 2024 Olympics), really benefited from that extra year and found they were able to sustain their motivation because it was able to create an opportunity for them.
‘The athletes who were probably hanging on and hoping to retire at the end of 2020, found that extra year very difficult.’
She says the dangers of Covid fatigue, of athletes worn down by the virus and its restrictions and the unending discussion around it, can be expected to dissolve once they start competing.
Another potential complication, though, is how an individual athlete fits into a team setting, when some are used to spending most of their time either on their own, or with a very tight circle of training partners and support staff.
‘If they plan it and expect it, they can embrace it. Things that they may not be used to (could include) emotional contagion from some sports that may be on a high, and others on a low, and that can bleed into the atmosphere of the wider group.
‘(It’s about) allowing athletes to be aware of that and prepare for it, so they don’t get caught up in it and allow themselves to be derailed.
‘There are smaller sports who have only one athlete qualified, and it’s likely those athletes will end up sharing a room with someone they don’t know that well. So again, that would be unusual because in a single-sport event they will know all the other competitors.’
Thousands of hours of expertise have been devoted to anticipating issues such as these. And all the time, the terrible, unspoken risk of an outbreak, or even a single case whose domino effect can ruin the dreams of others, lurks not far from all thoughts.
As athletes wrestle with these concerns, the business of hosting the Olympics took another sorry turn this week, with organisers having to bow to medical reality and move the games behind closed doors after Tokyo went into a state of emergency.
One newspaper poll showed 64% of respondents agreed with the decision to hold the Games without spectators, but public support for the Games has been heavily qualified since they were initially postponed.
Part of the reason is the difficulty Japan has had actually getting vaccines into the arms of its citizens.
Latest data suggests that just 16% of the population was fully vaccinated. Even that low figure has only been reached thanks to a major acceleration in the vaccination programme that started in May, which has involved military personnel building centres that provide thousands of shots a day.
Now, Japan is administering up to a million vaccines a day, but it is still playing catch-up, because initially only doctors and nurses were legally allowed to vaccinate people.
The authorities only started vaccinating members of the public in February, but the delay in vaccinating the population is also attributed to unwieldy bureaucracy, and the requirement by regulators that domestic trials of vaccines take place before they were approved for use.
Irish Olympians will fly into a frightened, suspicious city in the coming days and weeks, swapping one country frazzled by this dismal disease for another.
Their thoughts will be consumed by the need to do the right thing, all the time.
And then they will have to find time for the performance of their lives.
‘ATHLETES WHO WERE HANGING ON FOUND THE YEAR HARD’