Bach’s Olympic stance is a naive one – and an affront to all athletes
IOC president must give up his battle for the Games to go ahead in July, and postpone event until 2021
The trickle is becoming a torrent and, any day now, the dam wall will burst. Every sporting federation in every country ravaged by Covid-19 can see what the International Olympic Committee still refuses to concede: that in a year when a frightened world is quarantined indefinitely at home, this summer’s Tokyo Games are as locked on to be postponed as the global divorce rate is to go through the roof.
For all that Switzerland has a time-honoured habit of standing neutrally while everyone else is engulfed by horror, the IOC suits in Lausanne can ignore the carnage wrought by coronavirus no longer. The entire architecture that supports its greatest show – the trials, training, the complex qualification rituals – already lies in ruins. Thomas Bach’s pretence that the planet will have miraculously healed in time for the Olympics’ opening night on July 24 is an affront to all athletes.
And yet still Bach – the IOC president – procrastinates. “We just had a really great call,” he said of last week’s remote conference with 220 athletes, sounding as blithely optimistic as a businessman presenting his first-quarter results.
Four months to conquer a plague? No problem. Of course, he neglected to acknowledge that the Olympics are to social-distancing what a GrecoRoman wrestler is to the balance beam. At a time when we are urged to regard every fellow human being as a potential vector of disease, the most powerful administrator in sport is still entertaining the prospect, in 124 days’ time, of throwing 14,000 athletes into the world’s largest Petri dish.
If cruise ships are the Ferraris of the virus community, then the Olympics are the Bugatti Veyron, a place of shared dining halls, shared training quarters, shared bedrooms, and plenty more besides. One hardly needs a doctorate in epidemiology to realise it cannot happen, at least not according to the original schedule. For a start, the World Health Organisation, on whose advice the IOC claims to act, is sure to counsel strongly against it.
Lord Coe, inadvertently, gave the impression that such a tactic was all about money. After a spate of Diamond League cancellations in his own sport of athletics, he was coy about asking for Tokyo 2020 to be called off, saying: “I need to be careful I’m not removing the earning potential from athletes any more than I need to at this moment.”
It is tempting to believe, as with all sport’s unaccountable fiefdoms, that the IOC is vacillating because of its bottom line. After all, NBC, its official broadcast partner in the US, has sold almost £1billion in adverts.
The reality is not so straightforward. In the economic reckoning to come, there is little reason to suspect the IOC will be too high among those afflicted. The organisation is richer than Croesus – or, as Bach put it: “The IOC has no cash-flow problem.” Instead, he clings to the romantic, if vanishingly remote notion the Olympics can serve as the planet’s great re-boot postCovid-19. He is striving to salvage Tokyo as the party to end all parties, where humanity can celebrate overcoming a life-changing event.
That, for all the cavils about the IOC’s tone-deafness, is a noble ambition. But it is also a naive one. Contemplation of life beyond Covid-19 can only begin when the situation stabilises, not while the bell-curve of almost every nation’s infection steepens inexorably. Speculating about a date when sport can resume is not so much premature as irresponsible, and federations the world over are telling Bach as much. US Swimming has advocated postponement. So, too, has US Track and Field. Given this body represents Christian Coleman, Usain Bolt’s heir presumptive as Olympic 100metres champion, its opinion carries more weight than most. The question is when Bach will listen. Recent history suggests he rather enjoys engineering the seemingly impossible. At the last Winter Games, he basked in the reflected glow of bringing North and South Koreans together in a joint ice-hockey team – a gesture which secured him priceless publicity. The chance to conduct an even grander display of peace and harmony would be an enticing one.
Sadly, the philosophy of wait-andsee has run out of road. As if the anxiety over their health and that of their families were not enough, athletes are being put through the needless uncertainty of training. The Games are not some inviolable enterprise that can be stopped only by war. The fight against Covid-19 is a war in itself, and it is not even close to being won.
For that reason, Tokyo 2020 must, however great the financial and logistical cost, become Tokyo 2021.
He is striving to salvage Tokyo as the party to end all parties in overcoming a life-changing event