National Post (National Edition)
Why would anyone want the Olympics?
THE IDEA THAT THE IOC WAS DOING THIS FOR ANYONE OTHER THAN THEMSELVES HAS BEEN PROVEN UTTERLY FALSE BY THE EVENTS OF TOKYO 2020 . ... TENS OF THOUSANDS OF OLYMPIC VISITORS ARE ARRIVING FROM COUNTRIES DEALING WITH COVID-19 SURGES. — SCOTT STINSON
In Sochi it was the hotels, thrown together at the last minute, and sometimes beyond that, that were within months sitting empty and sinking back into the ground. In Rio it was unfulfilled promises to clean up the city's waterways, and multiple venues that soon fell into disrepair once the Olympics rolled out of town. Local authorities recently deemed some of them unsafe for the occasional events that had been held there, and locked the gates.
It is a terribly familiar story. A city and country bids for the Games, wins the prize, and then spends billions to meet the requirements of the biggest sporting event in the world. The party is fun, but the cleanup is a mess. The good legacy projects are matched by those that don't have a longterm purpose. The International Olympic Committee watched as wealthy Western nations stopped bidding for the Games and their associated costly headaches, and then it promised to promote sustainability as a key goal of an Olympiad.
But the idea that the IOC was doing this for anyone other than themselves has been proven utterly false by the events of Tokyo 2020. With the opening ceremony a week away for an Olympics that was postponed by a year due to the coronavirus pandemic, Tokyo and Japan have already absorbed all the usual problems — massive cost overruns, worries about the heat, venue issues — and now have two giant new concerns on their hands. Tens of thousands of Olympic visitors are arriving from countries dealing with COVID-19 surges, even as Tokyo itself is having a surge of its own. And, in a related matter, a local state of emergency will keep fans out of the stands, which was the last remaining hope that organizers could recoup some of the billions of dollars already spent, after they long since abandoned the prospect of visiting foreign tourists.
Tokyo 2020, then, will lose an extraordinary amount of money while exposing the Japanese public, which has so far avoided the severe COVID problems that have hit many other countries, to what will be the most dangerous part of the pandemic yet: an influx of Olympic visitors who will move around a country that for a wealthy nation has overseen a dismally slow vaccination rollout.
It all raises a simple question: Why would anyone want to host an Olympics ever again?
Public-opinion surveys suggest the Japanese certainly don't want to host one now, with around 80 per cent of respondents against the idea. Vocal opponents have included politicians, doctors and epidemiologists, newspapers, business leaders and even an Olympic medallist, Kaori Yamaguchi, who said she felt the country had been “cornered” into hosting the Games amid the pandemic.
That sounds about right. The IOC gets the vast majority of its revenue from global television rights, and those deals would not have been paid in the absence of Tokyo 2020. For months now the IOC, the local organizing committee and the Japanese government have insisted that the Olympics would happen this summer, as though they were a giant rolling ball that simply couldn't be stopped by this late in the calendar. At the same time, the government and organizers have ineptly handled some of the safety measures intended to keep the Games, and the public, safe. A late push has raised the COVID vaccination levels, with almost a third of Japanese adults having now received at least one dose. But that is far too low to produce the community protection now being seen in countries like Canada, and indeed Tokyo is presently dealing with record daily COVID case counts, leading to a state of emergency that could keep bars and restaurants closed throughout the Games.
And while Olympic visitors — athletes, coaches, staff, media — are under instructions to remain in a Tokyo 2020 bubble and avoid interactions with the general public, the fact remains that no one has ever tried to isolate a group on this scale before, with thousands of people moving between dozens of sites, in the heart of a busy city.
The early performance of the local bureaucracy does not give much hope that things will run smoothly: Olympic visitors had to submit a schedule of activities for their time in Japan, but delays in approvals have meant many of them are boarding planes while still not registered in the infection-control system developed for Tokyo 2020. So far, the bubble seems awfully porous.
But if Japanese officials have been slow to prepare for a pandemic Olympics, even with a yearlong delay, they can at least be forgiven for reflecting the general mood of the country. They are readying for a Games that will be in their country but on television only; the thousands of visitors will be closer to the action than the public will be. Few Japanese will experience the venues built for this specific purpose, but the debt created will last for years. Talk of Olympic legacies will mostly be about the ones they hope are not created: virus outbreaks that leak from the bubble into the wider public.
It is true that every Olympics brings stories of skepticism and concern, and then the competitions happen and for a couple of weeks everyone pushes the worries aside and enjoys the whole thing quite a lot. There is glory and heartbreak and spectacle and even a cynic will find moments to savour. But these Olympics, in this particular year, have all new levels of concern to overcome. The IOC has what it wants, which seems to be all that matters.