Golden wonders seal more GB glory
As Daley bookends the Games with another medal
IN THE sweltering heat of a Tokyo afternoon, a group of schoolchildren got off the Yurika-mome Line train at the Ariake-tennis-no-mori stop on Friday and ran straight over to the glass screens at the edge of the platform. They stood there for a while gazing down at the deserted BMX track with its steep start ramp and its undulating straights and its Olympic rings logo and its empty grandstands. They held up their phones to take pictures.
A few stops down the line, a similar scene had played out the night before near the Aomi Urban Sports Park, the venue for the sport climbing event. Groups of would-be spectators lingered self-consciously on a section of a wide walkway that afforded a view of the action through the open sides of the arena. Officials patrolled the area, holding up signs, in Japanese and English, which instructed people: ‘Do not stop here.’
As the Tokyo Olympics, the event that some people called the Cursed Games, draw to a close, it is still difficult to escape a feeling of sadness, wherever events take place, that the Japanese public has been denied the opportunity to witness them at first hand and that the greatest spectacle in sport has been drained of some of the energy that makes it such an uplifting festival of human endeavour.
These Olympics will always be remembered as the Pandemic Games: the first time in peacetime that they have been postponed; the first time they have taken place behind closed doors. But they will be remembered for more than that, too. They will be remembered as the Games that somehow overcame all those obstacles and all that sadness. They will be remembered as the Games that would not die.
They were not quite the harbinger of recovery for the world that so many had hoped they would be. They came too soon for that. Too many nations are still suffering too grievously with the coronavirus for these Olympics to have been the herald of rebirth. Instead, they operated in a state of siege, with athletes presenting themselves with their own medals, but they found the power to inspire even in those circumstances. They are still the Greatest Show on Earth.
HOW Tokyo saved the Games is a simple equation really. The athletes saved the Games. Their perseverance saved the Games. Their resilience saved the Games. Their grace and their strength and their breathtaking skill and their scarcely believable endurance and their speed and their agility saved the Games and turned it, despite everything, into a triumph over adversity.
And because these were the pared-down Games; because there were just the athletes in the arena; because they had the stage to themselves, the beauty and the courage of what they do were even more obvious. Yesterday, in the silence of the Tokyo Aquatics Centre, the bravery it takes for Tom Daley to perform a perfect armstand on a board high above the pool and then plunge, twisting and somersaulting into the water, had never felt more clear.
Daley bookended these Games for Team GB. His gold medal alongside Matty Lee in the synchronised 10m platform event on the first Monday galvanised his teammates and thrilled television viewers at home. It was one of the first hints that these Olympics would still captivate us with their feats and their life stories and the journeys they had taken to get here.
Daley finished third in the individual men’s 10m platform yesterday, pushing his relentless Chinese rivals, Cao Yuan and Yang Jian, deep into the fight. It means he is taking home a gold, a bronze and a series of ornately crafted knitted items to his husband, Lance, and his son, Robbie, and when he spoke after his event, he captured the feeling of achievement every competitor here should cradle.
‘There was a moment just before my first dive,’ said Daley, ‘when I looked around and I was like, “You know what, I’m at the Olympic
Games and this is bloody cool”. I made it to an Olympic Games after 18 months of uncertainty and every single Olympian that is here should be extremely proud of the fact that they made it here and of the hard work that they put in to get here.’
Some months ago, the British Olympic Association adopted the mantra that their primary focus had to be to ‘get the athletes to the start line’. They deserve immense credit for that, too. And despite accusations that they had diluted the intensity of the training of their athletes because of concerns they had been pushed to breaking point in the past, as the Games entered the last day, Great Britain were close to matching their recordbreaking haul of 67 medals from the Rio Games in 2016.
The Games even managed to rejuvenate themselves. There was much scepticism about the inclusion of events like skateboarding and, for the fourth time, BMX racing, but those sports were both spectacular successes that widened the audience of the Games and appealed to a new generation.
Team GB’s Sky Brown, 13, won bronze in the women’s skateboarding park event, becoming the youngest Briton ever to win an Olympic medal, and the sight of her and her friends supporting and encouraging each other and treating the event like fun, was one of the enduring images of the past fortnight.
And it is no surprise that Laura Kenny has become the favourite for the BBC Sports Personality of the Year Award after she became the first British female Olympian to win gold medals at three consecutive Games, when she and Katie Archibald triumphed so imperiously in the women’s madison at the Izu Velodrome on Friday.
There were so many inspiring moments. Laura Muir ran her heart out to win a silver medal in the women’s 1500m on Friday night in one of the most stacked fields of the Games, Dina Asher-Smith, whose Games had been blighted by injury, came back to win a bronze in the women’s 4x100m relay and a few minutes later the men’s 4x100m relay team came within an agonising one hundredth of a
second of winning gold. So they were a great celebration, these Olympics, but they were also an Olympics for our troubled times. Their theme was not invincibility but vulnerability. That happened right from the moment of their inception when Naomi Osaka, a tennis player who had withdrawn from the sport in recent months citing mental health issues, climbed a flight of steps to the top of a model of Mount Fuji, and lit the Olympic flame.
AND the perfect symbol for the Games was the woman who was supposed to be their biggest star. Simone Biles was predicted to dominate her events at these Olympics and become the first female gymnast to retain the all-around title at the Games for more than 50 years. She was to be the successor to Usain Bolt as the face of the Olympics but, like the Games themselves, things did not go to plan.
Instead, Biles’s story became one of uncertainty and fears, and vulnerability that forced her to pull out of the team event after her first vault. She spoke openly about the doubts that had beset her; how she was suffering from the ‘twisties’, a loss of spatial awareness in the air, and how she was determined to protect herself from the voices telling her to ‘push through’. How she was determined to take control of her life and only return to competition when she was ready.
And then she did return. She missed all of the events she had been scheduled to take part in and then, when there was only one discipline left, it was announced that she would compete in the beam final. She did a breathtaking routine that Tuesday night at the Ariake Gymnastics Centre and won a bronze medal. She said later that it meant more to her than the four golds she won five years earlier in Rio.
Biles was still derided as a quitter by some but she found almost universal support among fellow athletes, many of whom spoke of the peculiar pressures that training through a pandemic have brought.
Even Adam Peaty, probably Britain’s leading performer in Tokyo and the first British swimmer to defend an Olympic title, said after his events that he needed to take a break from the sport to safeguard his mental health.
Put together, it was the uplifting celebration of humanity that everyone had hoped, in their wildest dreams, that it might be. The Olympics not only survived but they prospered in Tokyo. And at a time when we need inspiration and escapism more than ever, the Olympians proved again that we look at them and see the best of us.