100 Days: Tokyo Olympics marked by footnotes and asterisks

TOKYO, April 14, (AP): Tokyo pitched itself as “a safe pair of hands” when it was awarded the Olympics 7 1/2 years ago.

“The certainty was a crucial factor,” Craig Reedie, an IOC vice president at the time, said after the 2013 vote in Buenos Aires.

Now, nothing is certain as Tokyo’s postponed Olympics hit the 100-daysto-go mark on Wednesday. Despite surging cases of COVID-19, myriad scandals and overwhelming public opposition in Japan to holding the Games, organizers and the IOC are pushing on.

Tokyo’s 1964 Olympics celebrated Japan’s rapid recovery from defeat in World War II. These Olympics will be marked by footnotes and asterisks. The athletes will aim high, of course, but the goals elsewhere will be modest: get through it, avoid becoming a superspreader event, and stoke some national pride knowing few other countries could have pulled this off.

“The government is very conscious of how ‘the world’ views Japan,” Dr. Gill Steel, who teaches political science at Doshisha University in Kyoto, wrote in an email. “Canceling the Olympics would have been seen, at some level, as a public failure on the international stage.”

The price will be steep when the Olympics open on July 23.

The official cost is $15.4 billion. Olympic spending is tough to track, but several government audits suggest it might be twice that much, and all but $6.7 billion is public money.

OLYMPICS

The Switzerland-based IOC generates 91% of its income from selling broadcast rights and sponsorship. This amounts to at least $5 billion in a fouryear cycle, but the revenue flow from networks like American-based NBC has been stalled by the postponement.

What does Tokyo get out of the 17day sports circus?

Fans from abroad are banned, tourism is out, and there’ll be no room for neighborhood partying. Athletes are being told to arrive late, leave early and maneuver around a moving maze of rules.

There are also reputational costs for Japan and the International Olympic Committee: a bribery scandal, botched planning, and repeated misogyny in the Tokyo Olympic leadership.

The IOC is betting Tokyo will be a distraction - “the light at the end of the pandemic tunnel”- as the closing ceremony comes just six months before the opening of the boycott-threatened Beijing Winter Olympics.

Various polls suggest up to 80% of Japanese want the Olympics canceled or postponed. And many scientists are opposed.

“It is best to not hold the Olympics given the considerable risks,” Dr. Norio Sugaya, an infectious diseases expert at Keiyu Hospital in Yokohama, told The Associated Press.

Japan’s vaccine rollout has been almost nonexistent, few will get shots before the Olympics open, and Tokyo has raised its “alert level” with another wave predicted about the time of the opening ceremony. About 9,500 deaths in Japan have been attributed to COVID-19, good by global measures but poor by standards in Asia.

And what’s the impact of 15,400 Olympic and Paralympic athletes from more than 200 countries and territories entering Japan, joined by tens of thousands of officials, judges, media, and broadcasters?

“The risks are high in Japan. Japan is dangerous, not a safe place at all,” Sugaya said.

The heavily sponsored torch relay with 10,000 runners crisscrossing Japan also presents hazards. Legs scheduled for Osaka this week were pulled from the streets because of surging COVID-19 cases and relocated into a city park - with no fans allowed. Other legs across Japan are also sure to be disrupted.

The IOC and Japanese politicians decided a year ago to postpone but not cancel the Olympics, driven by inertia and the clout of Japanese ad giant Dentsu Inc., which has lined up a record of $3.5 billion in local sponsorship - probably three times more than any previous Olympics.

Also:

SYDNEY: Australian athletes are preparing for a games like no other before them when the Tokyo Olympics start on July 23 - 100 days from Wednesday.

Among other pandemic-forced restrictions in Tokyo, Olympians won’t have family or friends watching them live in Japan, they will arrive and leave within days of their competition and their movement outside the Olympic Village will be limited.

“They know that these will be a really different games, and not having family and friends there is certainly a disappointment for many,” Australian chef de mission Ian Chesterman said Wednesday.

The Tokyo Games were delayed by a year after coronavirus travel restrictions made it impossible to hold them in 2020. “We are doing everything in our power to get the team to and from the games safely and, of course, to give them every opportunity to perform at their best when that moment comes,” Chesterman added.

With only a one-hour time difference between Tokyo and the east coast of Australia, the Australian Olympic Committee said Wednesday it would have a national series of live sites during the games. They include The Rocks in Sydney, the former 2000 Olympic site in western Sydney and other live sites in capital cities.

Meanwhile, Conn Findlay, a fourtime Olympic medalist in the sports of rowing and sailing and a member of two winning America’s Cup crews, has died. He was 90.

(AP) From left, Japan Olympic Committee President Yasuhiro Yamashita, Tokyo Gov. Yuriko Koike, Tokyo 2020 Organizing Committee Vice-president Toshiaki Endo, Ryoichi Ishikawa, Tokyo Metropolitan Assembly president, and Kunihiko Koyama, chairperson of special committee on measures to promote The Olympic and Paralympic Games of Tokyo Metropolitan Assembly, pose with the unveiled statues of Miraitowa, (left), and Someity, official mascots for the Tokyo 2020 Olympics and Paralympics, to mark 100 days before the start of the Olympic Games at the Tokyo Metropolitan Government building, on April 14, in Tokyo.

Australian Olympians Edward Fernon, modern pentathlon, and slalom canoeist Jess Fox stand by a sign at a ceremony to mark 100 days before the start of the Tokyo Olympics in Sydney, on April 14. (AP)