IOC leaders wise to ignore business as usual
Ultimately, the human cost simply wasn’t worth it.
The billions that have already been spent, and the billions more that will have to be spent now. The blow to national pride and political reputation. The fervent hope that one day soon this will all go away and we can just pick back up with our lives as they were before.
The International Olympic Committee took all of that into account and decided to postpone the Tokyo Games anyway.
“What made us take the decision were the developments of the dynamic spreading of the coronavirus,” IOC President Thomas Bach said on a conference call Wednesday morning. “We received a declaration from the World Health Organization, which was pretty alarming, where the director general said the situation is spreading, is accelerating.”
Makes you wonder what President Donald Trump is thinking. And who the “experts” are who’ve told him it’ll be fine, just fine, to reopen the country by Easter.
By wonder, I mean be terrified. The IOC is not an organization that does knee-jerk reactions. In the 124year history of the modern Olympics, this is only the fourth time a Summer Games won’t be held as scheduled. The other three were because of World War I (1916) and World War II (1940, 1944).
The IOC doesn’t have the luxury of operating on whims. It is too big, with 11,000 athletes from 206 nations competing in 33 sports expected for the Tokyo Games. There is too much money involved. The official operating budget for Tokyo was $12.6 billion before the COVID-19 pandemic, though one national governing audit report put the cost at $28 billion.
If and when the Games are held, the IOC stands to make more money than the annual GDP of some of the countries that are competing. For instance, in the most recent Olympic cycle, which ran from 2013 through 2016, the IOC had total revenue of $5.7 billion. Compare that to Tonga, home to everyone’s favorite shirtless Olympian, which had a GDP of $450 million in 2018.
Postponing a Games seven years in the making is a gargantuan undertaking, akin to turning around the Titanic, and it’s understandable why Bach, Japan Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and Tokyo organizers put it off as long as they could.
“Don’t forget at this time in the last couple of weeks, the (mitigation) measures of many governments, they were limited until mid of April, some the beginning of May,” Bach said. “We could not see measures having been taken lasting until July.
“You have maybe seen the latest declarations there in the United States, from President Trump, about the prospect of (by) mid of April there being able to lift many restrictions,” Bach added.
But delusion can masquerade as hope for only so long.
When the World Health Organization’s director general said the pandemic was “accelerating,” the IOC had to acknowledge that this was one time money and self-interest couldn’t be the driving force in its decision. Plowing ahead with plans to throw a worldwide party is not only tasteless and tone deaf when countries are struggling to bury their dead, it runs the risk of fueling the carnage.
Bach insisted he wasn’t trying to send a message by pointing out the disconnect between Trump’s opinion and those of health experts.
“We are not the World Health Organization, and we are not in a position to give advice to any of the world leaders how to handle this challenge in his or her respective country,” he said.
But the point was made nonetheless.
Far from beginning to see “light at the end of the tunnel,” as Trump claimed Tuesday, the United States is only plunging deeper into the darkness. The number of confirmed cases is skyrocketing – the 44,183 as of Monday afternoon was nearly double that from just two days earlier, and quadruple the number from five days earlier – and doctors in cities large and small are warning that the healthcare system is already teetering.
“We are now seeing a very large acceleration in cases in the U.S. So it does have that potential,” World Health Organization spokeswoman Margaret Harris said Tuesday, when asked if the
United States could become the new epicenter of the pandemic.
“We cannot say that is the case yet,” she added, “but it does have that potential.”
The only way to prevent the United States from becoming the next China or Italy is through tough mitigation efforts, the centerpiece of which are stay-athome measures that close all but essential businesses. That’s devastating to the economy, however, and Trump is petrified that the tanking stock market will take his re-election hopes right along with it.
Never mind that the spike in new cases and deaths that would follow the end of suppression efforts would be even more harmful.
Contrary to how it likes to style itself, the IOC is not a benevolent organization. Its natural preference is to protect itself, its reputation and its riches.
But even it could see the financial pain and disruption of postponing the Tokyo Games was necessary.
There will be a time for a “celebration of humankind,” as Bach said so loftily Wednesday. But that time is not now, be it for the Olympics or the rest of the world.