WE DON’T NEED AN OLYMPICS OF FEAR
AT THE Olympic Museum in Tokyo, in the shadow of the beautiful new Olympic Stadium, there is an exhibition dedicated to the 1964 Games, when the Japanese capital became the first Asian city to stage the festival of sport and the Olympics marked Japan’s re-emergence into the world after the horrors of its role in the Second World War.
The photographs on the walls are moving and inspiring, particularly the one that shows thousands of people lining the streets as the Olympic flame is carried through the ruins of Hiroshima. The Games became a symbol of reconciliation and togetherness. They epitomised what the Olympics is supposed to be about. They brought the world together through sport.
Last week, a new set of pictures emerged from Japan. They showed the Olympic flame arriving in Japan on a flight from Athens at the Matsushima defence force base on Friday.
‘The Olympic cauldron was lit in a small ceremony without a crowd, amid coronavirus fears,’ the report of the ceremony said. There was no sense of celebration. It felt almost like a surreptitious act.
There had been plans, apparently, for hundreds of local schoolchildren to attend. They were called off. And now that the torch relay is beginning its long and winding journey towards the Olympic Stadium, organisers and local authorities have urged those who had been planning to come out on to the streets to applaud it on its way to stay
at home instead.
And still the IOC and the local organising committee are desperately trying to maintain a united front by insisting that the Olympics will go ahead as planned and that the flame will be lit on Friday July 24, and that a spectacle can still be salvaged from the chaos and suffering that the coronavirus has wrought upon the world.
Is that what we want? Is that what Tokyo wants? Is that what the Japanese people want? Is it what anybody who loves the Olympics wants? Because what we are talking about staging here is a kind of shadow Olympics. An Olympics that will be more in shade than in sunlight. An Olympics of fear, not an Olympics of exultation.
That is what will happen if the IOC presses on with its plan to stage the Games and says to hell with what the rest of the world is doing to try to thwart COVID-19. It may be that Japan has the outbreak under control by this summer but it is fanciful in the extreme to think that every other country will be in the same position.
Part of the point of the Olympics is that it is a world jamboree. It brings people together from all the different corners of the planet. In the age of the new coronavirus, that means, sadly, that if the Olympics do go ahead this summer, they may double as the perfect breeding ground for a second wave of infections. What an Olympic legacy that would be.
That is before we even start on the preparations of the athletes. As we go into lockdown, like other countries around us, how can we expect athletes to be ready for July 24? Training centres are being shut down, running tracks are closing, gyms are shut, social distancing is seen as vitally important. Olympic athletes do not exist in a vacuum. They cannot simply ignore the rules that the rest of the population has to abide by.
It has got to the point where the only thing stopping the postponement of the Games is money. Money always gets in the way in modern sport. So Lord Coe is thinking about athletes’ earnings and the IOC is thinking about its TV deals and Japan is thinking about the financial outlay it has made on infrastructure. Unfortunately for all of them, COVID-19 doesn’t appear to care as much about money as they do.
This might be counter-intuitive for a powerful sporting body like the IOC or FIFA, but COVID-19 will not respond to the conventional methods of persuasion that have served them well in the past.
Fortunately, more and more people with strong voices are cutting through the self-interest. Current athletes, exathletes, administrators and responsible, well-run organisations like the BOA are increasingly breaking ranks and voicing concerns about the IOC’s head-in-the-sand approach.
Yesterday, the US track federation added its name to a swelling chorus of calls to postpone the Games. USA Swimming has already asked for the same thing. Brazil’s Olympic Committee is of the same mind. The objections are close to reaching a critical mass.
There may indeed be, as IOC member Sir Craig Reedie pointed out recently, ‘spectacular difficulties’ in moving the Games to later in the year or next summer, but Reedie is a man who is never knowingly anything other than tone-deaf in his pronouncements and he has got this wrong, too.
If UEFA can reschedule Euro 2020, if the Masters can be moved, then the Olympics can do it, too.
There is no reason why it cannot still be the celebration we all want it to be. Just not this summer. If it were rescheduled for the summer of 2021, there is a chance that a Tokyo Olympics may again come to be seen as a symbol of joy and release after a period of global suffering just as it was in 1964.
Let’s imagine the emotions an Olympics a little over a year from now might unlock. Imagine the rejoicing and the celebration of the human spirit it could unleash if the world is emerging into the sunlight again.
Instead of the shadow Olympics it will be if it is staged this summer, instead of the pale Olympics, the scared Olympics, the cautious Olympics, the hand-sanitiser Olympics, it could be the best Games ever.
It just needs the IOC to have the vision and the courage to do it.
For everyone’s sake, athletes and their families, spectators and their families, it is time to do the right thing.
It is time to call off the Olympic Games.
They could double as the perfect breeding ground for a new lot of infections