GAMES DODGE DISASTER
Tokyo 2020 avoids worst-case scenarios for COVID-19 as event nears halfway mark
Tunisian teenager Ahmed Hafnaoui barely qualified for the 400-metre freestyle final, and then went and won the thing from the outside-most lane. Unheralded Austrian cyclist Anna Kiesenhofer was so far in front of the next riders in the women's road race that the second-place finisher assumed she had won when she crossed the line. Suni Lee, the American gymnast, broke her foot last year, lost an aunt and uncle to COVID-19 and then watched as her world-famous teammate Simone Biles withdrew from the all-around competition. Lee won it herself to make it five straight Olympics in which the United States has won that signature event.
These are the stories that an Olympic Games will reliably deliver. Whatever concerns exist before the competitions begin — disorganization, terrorism, weather, pestilence — will always be washed away, at least a little, by the veritable flood of fascinating stories that an event of this size will produce. It's just what the Olympics does.
But these Olympics are unlike any other in that the usual worries were replaced by a giant one, the COVID-19 pandemic that postponed Tokyo 2020 into 2021 and then stubbornly refused to go away, forcing organizers into trying to develop countermeasures on the fly.
With Tokyo 2020 hitting its halfway point this weekend, the worst-case scenarios have been avoided: the whole enterprise didn't erupt into a riot of positive tests once tens of thousands of foreign visitors arrived to live and work in close quarters.
But neither has it gone smoothly. The frequent testing of those within the Olympic bubble has uncovered 225 positive COVID cases, 23 of those among athletes, the most notable of which was American pole vaulter Sam Kendricks, a medal favourite who had to withdraw from competition this week. There has meanwhile been a dramatic rise in COVID cases in Tokyo and surrounding areas, with repeated record highs and four straight days of case counts that were more than double those from a week earlier. Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga said the coronavirus is “spreading to a degree and in a manner never before seen in Japan,” according to the Japan Times. (On Friday, he expanded a state of emergency to areas surrounding Tokyo and extended it to the end of August.)
Thousands of Olympic visitors are reaching the end of the 14-day quarantine period where their movements were restricted to Olympic venues, facilities, and accommodation, and only on official Olympic transportation, all in an effort to avoid interaction with the Japanese public.
All of which leads to an uncomfortable truth: Olympic visitors will be loosed upon the public right as Tokyo tries to beat back a surge in detected COVID cases. These Games have more than a week to go; can they stagger to the finish line without a disaster?
It is perhaps not surprising that Tokyo 2020 finds itself in this situation. From the outset, the organizers' attempt to pull off an Olympics amid a pandemic has contained a mess of contradictions and a boatload of hope. Visitors are asked to respect physical distancing at all times, and then will be crammed on a bus because there isn't the capacity to keep things moving if the buses are not crammed.
The larger challenge is that the entire COVID containment strategy hinges on a bubble of sorts in which visitors are supposed to avoid the non-olympic Japanese public almost entirely, except it lacks much of anything in the way of a policing or enforcement strategy.
Tokyo 2020 is coming up on the halfway point, and from a COVID perspective it has remained relatively unscathed. But there's still another half remaining. Buckle up.