Last Word Where the editor stands on a box and rants.
Tokyo 2020: is it going to be worth it?
The rescheduled Summer Olympics, delayed from 2020, were intended to be held in a world that had brought the pandemic under control. When they were postponed, there was an optimism that Tokyo 2020 would go ahead in some kind of relative ‘normality’. Of course, that’s not the case. The western world is a shifting mess of lockdowns, vaccination programmes, third, fourth and fifth waves of variant viruses, quarantine procedures, strained public health systems, torpid economies and all the rest that COVID-19 has dragged along with it.
The Olympics ultimately relies on certainty; it works only because it doesn’t move on the calendar. You can’t delay it for a couple of days while you fix a few things. It’s a performance of logistics on a titanic scale. If one aspect of it is not on track, the only solution is to throw immense amounts of resources at it until it is. Many aspects of Rio 2016, not helped by major budget problems and a general Brazilian disposition to do things at the last minute, were barely finished in time. The 2016 Paralympics almost didn’t take place at all.
Few people have the conception of just how big and complicated putting on a Games is, and how it becomes a simple choice of ‘go’ or ‘no go’, and that choice has essentially long been made. This inflexibility has butted up hard against the world of the past 18 months, where events large and small have been cancelled, postponed, postponed again, or readapted for an online world, often at very short notice. The Japanese public are understandably furious that the rest of the western world gets to choose what is allowed under public health guidelines and to follow the path of the pandemic, when they are stuck with something far too big to just cancel.
At the time of writing, a narrative has developed in the press that the Japanese government and the IOC are determined to press on with the Games in the teeth of an uncertain, wavering pandemic and broadly negative public opinion – even if opinion polls are not a good guide to Olympic futures. Many articles seem to suggest that Japan are essentially being forced to hold the Summer
Games somewhat against their will, on pain of forfeiture contracts that will ruin it financially. The IOC has become the villain of the piece, even if it has been mostly Japanese politicians standing up and saying ‘we're going full steam ahead’.
There is also much focus in the Japanese press and elsewhere on claims that the 60,000 or so athletes, journalists, broadcasters, judges, coaches and federation people pitching up will be bringing a bunch of coronavirus variants to their islands, turning the Olympics into a ‘superspreader’ event.
Of course, none of these same articles are also calling for the cancellation of the PGA tour, or Wimbledon, or the European Championships, or the Tour de France, or any of the many other sporting events taking place this summer. None of them points out the large number of other (albeit smaller) sporting events that have already taken place this year with little or no incident.
Voices as loud as the New York Times have piled in: “The IOC oversees the most pervasive yet least accountable sport infrastructure in the world. The group appears to have fallen under the spell of its own congenital impunity. Pressing ahead with the Olympics risks drinking poison to quench our thirst for sport. The possibility of a superspreader catastrophe is not worth it for an optional sporting spectacle.”
testing, testing
Barely any of these articles acknowledge the extensive steps being taken to specifically make sure that this is not the case, as detailed in the much-vaunted (but under-promoted) IOC ‘playbooks’ for all attendees. No one going will be admitted into Japan if they haven’t had two doctor-certified negative COVID-19 tests in the preceding three days. Despite the global focus on vaccinations, having had your jabs changes no part of the procedures everyone has to go through.
The UK, along with India and several developing countries, is under further special measures, because of variants. Currently, Olympic visitors from India are being asked to take seven coronavirus tests in the seven days leading up to their flight to Japan. The expense and logistical difficulty here – and never mind that India has far fewer places to get tested than most countries – you can probably imagine. Visitors will then be tested on arrival and multiple times after that.
What happens exactly if you test positive after you have arrived in Japan is not detailed, nor what happens if you have been in close contact with someone else who tests positive. If you are an athlete, there is the distinct possibility of seeing everything you have worked for your entire life go down the drain through no fault of your own.
No one with accreditation will be allowed to go sightseeing, use public transport, go into a bar or a restaurant or, indeed, do anything apart from go between hotel and venue to work or compete. (Denied of all overseas revenue, Tokyo’s hospitality industry is unsurprisingly furious and is adding to the
cancellation chorus.) This will be enforced by an app installed on every accredited visitor’s smartphone that tracks movement.
Essentially, the Olympics will become – as far as possible – its own ‘bubble’, separated from the Japanese public. This has upset many commentators, pointing out that the spirit of the Games is best displayed when the circus connects directly with the public. That will simply not happen this time.
Japan is stuck between a rock and a hard place. They can tough it out in the face of grim opinion polls and a vocally annoyed population, and the risk, however low, of a public health disaster. Or they can cancel and face political wrath, grim financial fallout and catastrophic global loss of face.
Many see the Olympics as a contractual obligation, held only to ensure the allimportant billions in contracted broadcast revenue appears and cascades through the system, though it is clear this Olympics will lose the country a fortune anyway.
In June, Japanese Olympic Committee member Kaori Yamaguchi stated that Japan had been ‘cornered’ into staging the Olympics and Paralympics – even as she conceded that they would be going ahead:
“Were not the Olympics supposed to be a festival of peace? … It begins with tenaciously engaging in dialogue with people who hold diverse views. If we abandon this process, then the Olympics have no meaning... The opposite of peace is a hard-line, stubborn approach based on the view that ‘people may be saying all kinds of things, but once the Olympics start it’ll be fine’. What will these Olympics be for and for whom?” she asked.
If the draconian system of containment, testing and isolating is effective, and if the coronavirus takes its usual summer dip in the Japanese heat, the Games may well be a success – even if the TV broadcasters are forced to dub cheering and applause on to the spectacle to disguise the half-empty stadiums and subdued fans.
On the other hand, a nightmare scenario, such as a major virus outbreak in the Olympic Village, could even bring the whole thing to a halt halfway through.
faustian pact
Yamaguchi is right about one thing; in this Faustian pact that Tokyo has gotten itself into, something might be missing: who will these Olympics be for? If holding the Games rides roughshod over a nation’s feelings, is it really worth doing? While it should be noted more often that the Olympics sustains hundreds of thousands of jobs all over the world, it relies, ultimately, on the acceptance of the host nation. In Tokyo, the world’s media will be looking everywhere for cracks in the armour.
There has been a distinct trend in the past decades among cities bidding for the right to host the Olympics of putting their bid to a public referendum, and the public saying a loud NO. Many now think the Games is too huge and expensive for a single city and its tax base, and that countries should spread it out among several locales.
Or, as the Games is mostly experienced on TV, spread it around the world – as with the football European Championships. Faced with this growing chorus, the IOC changed its procedures and locked up the next three Summer Games to the single city model: Paris in 2024, Los Angeles in 2028 and (soon to be confirmed) Brisbane in 2032. It seems to accept there is the need for change – just not right now.
Many hearts and minds will need to be won over the next few months and years. There is a risk that the entire circus will go into long-term decline if audiences are turned off, with attendant consequences for ‘our thing’ and every other sport, too. If the Olympics is too big to cancel, and too inflexible to deal with a changing world with unknown dangers ahead, it needs to adapt – and perhaps sooner than we think.
“IF HOLDING THE GAMES RIDES ROUGHSHOD OVER A NATION’S FEELINGS, IS IT REALLY WORTH DOING?”