Experts: Olympics unlikely in ’21
Thomas Bach has described next summer’s Tokyo Olympics as the first major opportunity for the world to celebrate the end of the COVID-19 pandemic, with the Olympic flame serving as “a light at the end of this dark tunnel.”
“The fragile post-corona world needs the unifying power of the Olympic Games,” the International Olympic Committee president said in a speech Friday.
The question, however, is whether that “post-corona world” will exist on July 23, 2021, when the rescheduled Tokyo Olympics are slated to begin.
Public health experts are highly skeptical. As COVID-19 continues to spread, with more than 14 million reported cases and more than 600,000 deaths around the world, they say it’s unlikely the Tokyo Olympics – and the Paralympics, which are slated to begin Aug. 24, 2021 – can or will be held as scheduled.
“I do not think (holding the) Olympic Games in 2021 is (a) realistic goal,” Kentaro Iwata, a professor of infectious diseases at Kobe University in Japan, wrote in an email.
Experts said the notion of holding the Olympics as normal, with packed stadiums and typical grandeur, is unfathomable, given the trajectory of the pandemic and scientists’ growing understanding of COVID-19. A vaccine, even if discovered in the coming months, would likely not be widely available by next summer.
Staging the Games in some sort of modified fashion could be possible, experts said – but every step toward safety, such as doing away with the Olympic Village or eliminating high-risk sports, would force the Olympics to drift further from their principles.
“It would be far from what the IOC calls ‘normal,’” said Ronald Waldman, a professor of global health at George Washington University. “It would hardly be recognizable. And I just don’t see it happening.”
The IOC and local organizers have spoken only vaguely about their efforts to “simplify” some aspects of the Tokyo Olympics, and they have declined to reveal specifics about their contingency plans or potential COVID-19 countermeasures.
Both entities, however, have said they remain fully committed to holding the Games approximately one year from now, and that they will not be postponed a second time due to COVID-19. If they cannot be held as currently scheduled, they will simply be canceled – a move that would have billion-dollar ripple effects for the Olympic movement, the Japanese economy and television networks like NBC.
“It’s 2021 or bust, right?” said Amir Attaran, an epidemiologist and professor of law and medicine at the University of Ottawa. “Then it’s clearly bust, if that’s the case. If you take them at their word, it’s clearly done.”
Could a vaccine be the answer?
When the IOC and the Japanese government first announced in March that they were postponing the Tokyo Games, there was hope that time would be their ally. Maybe COVID-19 would fizzle over time. Maybe scientists would identify an effective form of treatment or develop a vaccine.
Instead, COVID-19 has proven to be relatively persistent – especially in countries like the United States, where cases have spiked dramatically in recent weeks.
Waldman, who previously worked with the World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said it now appears “very, very likely” that the disease will still be spreading across much of the world by the early months of 2021. And that does not bode well for the Olympics.
“The major concern is not just the holding of the event itself, which I think is logistically almost impossible,” Waldman said. “But when you factor in all of the time that’s required up front, the lead-up time for both organizers and the athletes, I just can’t imagine that could all happen.”
Some have put their faith in a vaccine as a silver bullet. But the discovery of a vaccine, even by the end of the year, would be just the first step.
Attaran suspects it will take years to manufacture and distribute a vaccine on a global scale, and that by next summer, most of the world’s at-risk populations will still be waiting for doses. This means the simplest solution for the Olympics – to vaccinate all of the athletes before they arrive in Tokyo – would also prompt ethical questions.
Should a group of the world’s fittest athletes, most of them in their 20s and 30s, receive vaccines before some of the world’s elderly or immunocompromised?
Possibilities and consequences
Experts were careful to distinguish between the impossible and the unlikely.
It would certainly be possible to hold the Olympics, in some form, next summer, they said – but the necessary alterations would be costly and unwieldy.
“I can come up with scenarios in my head for how you could do it,” said Krutika Kuppalli, an infectious diseases physician and biosecurity fellow at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. “(But) they’re not scenarios that I think people would like.”
Kuppalli said organizers would likely have to start by eliminating any large gatherings of people from multiple countries. That would mean severely limiting stadium capacities, barring fans from outside of Japan, or holding the Games behind closed doors altogether.
Any of those changes, however, would be difficult for organizers to swallow. The absence of fans would have dire financial consequences for Japan, whose taxpayers have already footed the bulk of the $12-billion bill for the Games. The ceremonies and village, meanwhile, are pillars of the overall Olympic experience.
Kuppalli floated the idea of isolating athletes by sport, and perhaps also by nationality within each sport – essentially creating a series of mini-bubbles similar to those being employed by the NBA, WNBA and MLS.
Other experts said Olympic organizers could mitigate risks by eliminating the sports that pose the highest risk of transmission, such as rugby, or trimming down the field of 11,000 athletes who are expected to compete. (The IOC and local organizers have said they aren’t considering either option.)
The Tokyo 2020 organizing committee plans to begin work on COVID-19 countermeasures this fall. When asked Friday to clarify what scenarios are being considered, Bach said only that “you cannot address the details yet.”