Surreal start — an Opening Ceremony with no crowd
Olympics officially begin, with American Naomi Osaka lighting the torch in a nearly empty stadium.
TOKYO — Inside a virtually empty stadium, during a moment of silence for lives lost, you could hear the protesters. Chanting through megaphones, banging on drums.
“Cancel the Olympics. Stop them immediately. Stop the Opening Ceremony right now!”
They didn’t stop the Games. The orchestrated television show opened and will continue for a 16day run.
No, the Olympics won’t be canceled. But they aren’t the same. This doesn’t feel like the real Olympics, but a hollowedout version of the event. I don’t know how it came off on NBC, but inside the empty stadium it felt lifeless.
These are shaping up to be a Games of turmoil and protest. So, it seemed fitting that Naomi Osaka, the JapaneseHaitianAmerican who has become an athlete of the moment with her raw honesty and peaceful protest, was selected to light the torch.
Did it seem odd that an
athlete from the United States (but who plays for Japan) had that honor? It makes as much sense as anything else in these Games.
Athletes marched in, waving for a television camera, parading on the world’s most expensive soundstage. The only audience was 3,500 media members and a few thousand dignitaries, including Japan’s Emperor Naruhito and Dr. Jill Biden.
The parade of athletes was a fraction of what it normally is because athletes are not allowed to be here until five days before their competition. Many who are already here chose to skip the madeforTV event, either due to upcoming competition or COVID concerns.
And many athletes circled around the side and immediately exited the back tunnel as soon as they had crossed the stage. A smart move, not only to prepare for competition, but also to stay away from the clusters of athletes who remained on stage, in nonsocially distanced groupings.
The gathering of athletes is almost always an inspiring moment. Young people from different countries, from nations at war with each other, from opposite sides of the earth, mingle in the greatest peacetime gathering on the globe.
But like every other gathering on the globe in the past 17 months, these Olympics carry the threat of disease.
There have already been positive coronavirus tests here in Tokyo. Athletes who must quarantine rather than compete. What kind of contact tracing might come out of the Opening Ceremony?
No wonder some were rushing through it. You would have to be in serious denial not to be concerned about the athlete next to you, not only from another country but your own teammate.
And that includes the U.S. team. In a news conference a few hours before the Games officially opened, Dr. Jonathan Finnoff, the chief medical officer of the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee, estimated that only 83% of the athletes who have completed their health history form had been vaccinated. USA Today reported that 567 of the 613 members of Team USA had completed the form as of Friday.
That means that almost 100 American athletes — almost a sixth of the team — are unvaccinated. And they are at risk of not only ruining their own Olympic dreams but those of their teammates.
It seems reckless and selfish and shockingly shortsighted.
But reckless seems to be the theme of these Games. The official motto is “United by Emotion,” but only if that emotion is nervousness. More like “United by Risk.”
Even without spectators and far fewer athletes, the Opening Ceremony was long and excessive. One moving moment was that for the first time in Olympic history, the Israeli Olympians murdered by terrorists in Munich in 1972 were mentioned and mourned.
After 206 countries marched in, the two most unpopular people in Japan — International Olympic Committee President Thomas Bach and Tokyo Olympic Committee President Hashimoto Seiko — gave speeches. Bach had the nerve to thank doctors and nurses, though virtually all of them have been opposed to the Games being held.
Bach spoke of the pandemic in the past tense, as though it were over. He spoke of the Olympics uniting the world, though these Games can’t even unite Japan.
The Emperor declared the Games open. Fireworks went off.
Yet there was still another hour to go while the athletes who weren’t smart enough to head straight for the exit remained in the thick hot night.
This is a television show. The athletes are the actors making it happen. But the most important Olympians are the rights holders who spent billions to air the Games.
At long last, Osaka appeared in white, with long pinkstreaked hair. The fact that her opening singles match had been postponed from Saturday morning in Tokyo to Sunday was a tipoff that she would be involved in the lengthy latenight ceremony.
Osaka has been a lightning rod. So she was a good choice to light the torch for games fraught with controversy, where the IOC’s Rule 50, banning social protest and demonstrations, has been a hot topic, where protesters pressed against barricades outside the stadium.
“It’s wildly different,” U.S. flagbearer and basketball player Sue Bird said of her fifth Olympics. “I remember hearing the crowd roar when we are announced. We know it’s different. There will be no roar, just walking into an empty stadium.”
Bird has seen a lot in her 17 years as an Olympian.
“People have asked what advice I can give,” she said. “But there’s no advice to give because this is unprecedented.
“This Olympics is like no other.”