Sprinter’s peril raises doubts about Games
Despite a global pandemic and its own staggering inadvisability, the Tokyo Olympics somehow managed to generate the standard emotional wallop of inspirational outcomes. But in the end, whether you hold ’em, you fold ’em, or you’ve just exhaustively retold ’em, the Games always seem to produce some horrifying event no one anticipated.
My favorite this time was the 5,000-mile women’s Lit -erally Run For Your Life race, won unwittingly by Belarusian sprinter Krystsina Tsimanouskaya, at least for the moment. Even if the 24year-old sprinter’s weeklong saga was the very outline of
an international espionage thriller — instructed to go home by her own coaches after they tried unsuccessfully to put her in a race she hadn’t trained for, nearly forced onto a plane back to Belarus and told to expect “some form of punishment,” rescued by Japanese police using her Google translator at Haneda Airport, sheltered in the Polish embassy, flown to Austria and a connection to asylum in Warsaw — most all Olympic stories still come down to one thing, don’t they?
The dope.
It’s always about the dope.
So that’s how it started for Tsimanouskaya, who competed in the 100 meters and was scheduled to compete in the 200 meters Monday, but was asked to be part of the 1,600 relay by Belarusian officials — a race she had never run — after several teammates failed to take the required number of doping tests.
Funny how that happens. Tsimanouskaya complained on Instagram — probably not her best move — and soon had it explained again by her coaches that she would be best advised to fake an injury and go home. “The key phrase was,” she told The Associated Press, “that, ‘We didn’t make the decision for you to go home, it was decided by other people and we were merely ordered to make it happen.’”
That’s apparently when the “punishment” screw turned, according to the sprinter, who said, “there were also thinly disguised hints that more would await me.”
Like what?
Well, under Belarusian strongman Alexander Lukashenko, happily if not necessarily hopefully labeled “Europe’s Last Dictator” by the international intelligentsia, a chilling array of potential consequences has long been in play.
Vitaly Shishov’s body was found hanged in a park Tuesday in Ukraine, from where he led a group that assists Belarusian dissidents who have fled Lukashenko’s autocracy. Police are treating it as a murder, so it’s no wonder Tsimanouskaya estimated Thursday that she might be able to return to her homeland in “five to 10 years.”
You heard her. The sports world could be getting its first 10-year cooling off period.
On Friday, the International Olympic Committee, having investigated Tsimanouskaya’s account, expelled two Belarusian coaches from the Olympic Village, according to the BBC, and in a statement said it had removed their accreditations “as a provisional measure in the interested of the well-being of the athletes of the National Olympic Committee of Belarus who are still in Tokyo.”
This story doesn’t stop as the Games draw to a close this weekend. There are no closing ceremonies, let alone psychological closure, for Tsimanouskaya. She’s in Poland partly because she hopes to compete again, but mostly because she’s fairly confident her husband and her parents can visit. She’s eventually hoping to reunite with her grandmother, who warned her last week not to return to Belarus “because on TV, they say a lot of bad words about you, that you have some mental problems,” the sprinter told a Warsaw news conference. The matter of whether they can all wait out the reign of Lukashenko is not without hope.
“You can see how they blew this out of proportion,” said Elena Korosteleva, a professor of international politics quoted by The Associated Press. “Just a brief criticism by a sprinter of the Belarusian bureaucracy suddenly turned into an international scandal. It’s another demonstration of power.
“Lukashenko feels very vulnerable at the moment because he knows he’s very dependent on Russia, which seems to be the only protector of Belarus. He knows he remains very vulnerable against his own people and of course against the international community. ... One way or another, if not today, Lukashenko’s regime is definitely coming to an end.”
Tsimanouskaya has to know that Tokyo might have been her last Olympics, which might not be all that bad a thing for her or anyone else. As the unparalleled American gymnast Simone Biles demonstrated so gracefully this time, just as Michael Phelps and many of our greatest Olympians have already, the Games are a virtual petri dish for mental anguish and anxiety. There’s something endemically unnerving and perhaps unhealthy, I’ve always felt, about training four years for a moment in which you can lose by a tenth of a second or a tenth of an inch.
Add to that emotional pathogen the massive investment, economic destabilization, human displacement, financial scandals, political scandals, doping scandals, and this time in Japan, close to 400 positive COVID19 tests since July, mostly to workers, despite explicit warnings of that exact tragedy — and it seems no longer prudent to consider the Olympics too big to fail.
Maybe it’s too big to exist.