ANN KILLION: THESE WEREN’T THE REAL OLYMPICS.
As a spectacle with no spectators, the Tokyo Games lacked heart
TOKYO — These could have been the best Olympics. The most wonderful.
Instead, they are perhaps the worst. Definitely the weirdest.
The Tokyo Olympics, which came hyped as a moment of communal healing, instead became a sealed-off experience. An athletic Truman Show. If you were being healed, or entertained, it was in front of your screen.
“It is ‘The IOC Presents the 2020 Olympics Live From Tokyo on NBC, minus Japanese people’ ” said Peter Williams, a media entrepreneur who has lived here for 30 years.
And these Olympics will prompt further debate about the purpose and meaning of the Games going forward.
Are the Olympics meant to bring the world together? Are they designed to be a point of pride and celebration for the host city? Or are they just a television show, intended to make money for rights holders and the IOC?
Before the pandemic, these Tokyo Games held such promise. The country was enthusiastic, welcoming, and crazy for sports. Japan is organized — not in a dictatorial kind of way, but in a functional, smooth manner. Tokyo, as a host city, is dazzling, efficient, clean and safe. The venues are beautiful.
But nobody is here to experience it. These games have taught us more than any before them: People — humanity — are the heart of the Olympics.
Further showing his complete disassociation from reality, IOC president Thomas Bach said this week, “When you were in competitions, many times you did not realize that there were no spectators.”
He was ridiculed around the world for those tone-deaf comments. The echoing emptiness of the venues is signature feel of these Olympics.
Then again, this is the same guy who called the suffocating smog in 2008 Beijing “mist,” who days before the Games blundered by calling the Japanese people “Chinese,” and said the spike in COVID cases in this country has nothing to do with the Olympics, despite 80,000 outsiders putting pressure on an overtaxed medical system.
You have been watching and enjoying and applauding. The athletes have been winning medals and making lifetime memories.
But these are not real Olympics.
“It’s such a disconnect, being cooped up and working from home but seeing thousands of international athletes on TV in the same city that you’re in,” said Chelsea Hayoshi, who originally had been thrilled about the Games coming to her city. “It’s very sad to watch unfold.”
It has been very sad for the Japanese people. They can’t go to the Games. Business owners can’t profit from tourism because there is none: restaurants are supposed to shut down at 8 p.m., bars are shut tight if they don’t serve food, and visitors are not supposed to leave their bubble anyway.
The debt going forward is disastrous — $26 billion by some estimates. There is no money coming into the economy to help balance the scales. No free will of the country to decide its own fate — only the IOC could have pulled the plug.
“There was outright rage that Japan was strong-armed into hosting,” said Minako Abe, a doctor at a Tokyo cancer clinic. “Now I think it’s not so much anger, but quiet resignation.”
Though there is still some anger. There have been almost daily protests, usually strategically placed near a media bus stop. On Saturday, at the basketball venue, about 40 police officers watched a small protest pleading to “stop the Olympics” — which only had one day remaining.
Japan also has pride. Not only for the Japanese athletes, who have performed well and — when they don’t — often have broken down in tears and apologized. They feel the pressure the entire country is under. Japan stands (as of Saturday) third in the gold medal count with 24, double the number the country earned in Rio.
It’s not just the athletic success that has helped ease Japan’s bitterness. It is the fact that the country has not cracked under the pressure of the Pandemic Olympics.
“The Games are being executed properly,” Williams said. “Athletes are showing up on time to events and performing remarkably. I feel there is some pride in that, considering the hardships and the complete lack of upside for Tokyo and the people of Japan.”
The Olympics have, of course, brought joy to the athletes who competed. They fulfilled longheld dreams, and a few won medals. But joy was tempered by relief that the grind and sacrifice were over. Their training was extended for a year; the circumstances were stressful and lacking in fun. It was a strain.
These games had the usual Olympic story lines: defection, doping, a few controversies. A transgender woman competed for the first time. A transgender nonbinary athlete won a gold medal. The American women crushed it.
But the primary theme was the grind. These were always going to be the mental health Olympics, even before Simone Biles put that issue front and center. Holding an Olympics in a pandemic was hard on everybody.
While there was no widespread shutdown at the COVID Olympics, the virus derailed the dreams of some athletes and sent several into quarantine at special hotels. And the specter of the disease was everywhere — stay apart, sanitize, wear masks, don’t eat in public, don’t go out, don’t clap, don’t cheer. The COVID numbers kept creeping up, with daily reports of the number of people infected in the city and the numbers connected to the Olympics.
There was no way to pretend this was not the Pandemic Olympics, not for those of us here.
Now it is on to Beijing, for a Winter Olympics, that begin in just a few months, which means the pandemic certainly will still be going. The threat of a boycott looms.
And then a short, three-year Olympic cycle to the next Summer Games in Paris. The head of the Paris organizing committee has said the goal is to make the 2024 Olympics accessible, to involve the fans. If the pandemic is over by then, perhaps that will be possible.
If so, it would be a welcome change. Because if the Tokyo Olympics have taught us anything, it is that people, humanity, are the heart of the Games.