DELAY IN CHANGING OLYMPIC DATE MAY HAVE COST LIVES
How much faster would countries have acted if IOC made a decision weeks ago?
TORONTO For most of the past month, as the International Olympic Committee ever so slowly came to the dawning realization that the Tokyo 2020 Games would have to be postponed, the act of rescheduling such a large event was discussed as though it would be a logistical nightmare.
One of the reasons for the languid march to postponement, we were repeatedly told, was because the IOC and local organizers didn’t want to rush into something before having the alternative dates worked out. Just eight days ago, the IOC had said it needed four weeks to properly consider a postponement — a statement that appeared to spur the Canadian and Australian teams to say they were out of any 2020 Games, even if they went ahead as scheduled.
On Monday in Tokyo, organizers announced they had come up with a new tentative date for the opening ceremonies: July 23, 2021. The Olympics would close on Aug. 8. That window begins and ends exactly 364 days after the event was supposed to take place this summer. It essentially kicks off on the exact same weekend, but the following year.
This was the move that required all of the careful consideration that the tall foreheads in Lausanne could muster? I like to imagine that everyone was seriously and thoughtfully gathered around a large, ornate conference table, and there were all sorts of complicated scenarios being discussed and then someone — probably an intern who didn’t realize that the whole point of being on the IOC was to furrow your brow over weighty decisions long enough to get an expensive catered lunch — just blurted out: “Couldn’t we just, you know, push it back a year?”
And then everyone looked at each other and decided to give it a good mulling over once the sandwiches and cheese plates arrived.
This was always the solution. It has been staring them in the face since the moment it became obvious the novel coronavirus was not going to be a problem restricted to China, as countries have followed a distressing pattern of not realizing the spread of the illness in their populations until it’s too late. This only makes the IOC’S reluctance to act quickly all the more troubling.
As we have learned repeatedly in these strange times, days matter. Weeks matter tremendously. How many of the thousands of Olympic hopefuls around the world circumvented the increasingly strict physical-distancing guidelines implemented in their home countries as they sought to prepare for Tokyo, which the IOC kept insisting it was planning to run as scheduled in July? How many coaches and trainers and therapists did likewise?
How many people who have no ties to the Olympics might have taken the risks of coronavirus more seriously if Tokyo 2020 had been postponed weeks ago? The sad reality is that a lot of the public takes more notice of this kind of stuff, whether it is Tom Hanks or Rudy Gobert or the Olympic rings that are affected, than it does the warnings of public-health officials.
But it’s not just the athletes and those around them who had to weigh the risks of continued Olympic preparation. In a grim irony, Japan, one of the early success stories of COVID-19 containment, may be about to backslide significantly.
Japan was one of the first countries outside China to order widespread school closures as it aggressively fought the spread of the virus, and, perhaps as importantly, wanted to be seen to be taking extreme measures, to preserve the idea of an Olympics this summer.
But now there are questions about how successful the Japanese approach actually was.
Former prime minister Yukio Hatoyama has accused authorities in Tokyo of avoiding lockdowns and other physical-distancing guidelines to make coronavirus appear to be less of a problem. More ominously, Hatoyama has suggested that limited testing for the virus “made the number of patients look smaller,” according to The Associated Press.
“It was Olympics first, not Tokyo’s residents,” Hatoyama said.
Last week, just after the decision to postpone the Olympics was announced, Tokyo’s governor advised residents to stay home on the weekends, a limited first step in the direction of isolation measures that have taken hold across the world. And on the weekend, Shinzo Abe, the current Japanese Prime Minister, said health officials there expect a steep increase in coronavirus cases.
Japan’s confirmed COVID-19 total is about a third of Canada’s, despite a population four times as large packed into a much smaller area, but early success with isolating infected clusters could be undone if the virus is now spreading unchecked.
“I’m aware that some people suspect Japan is hiding the numbers, but I believe that’s not true,” Abe said, according to The Associated Press.
Had the IOC continued with the timeline announced just over a week ago, these questions would have been asked even as local organizers were barrelling toward a Games that was four months away.
That common sense eventually prevailed is, obviously, a relief. Now we just have to find out how much harm the IOC caused by waiting so long to make the only decision it could.
How many people ... might have taken the risks of coronavirus more seriously if Tokyo 2020 had been postponed weeks ago?