A whimper and a bang: Summer Games close
Pandemic: Stripped of spectators, event fails to get up close and personal
TOKYO >> The 2020 Olympic Games, delayed a year by the pandemic, will be remembered for the courage of Simon Biles and Allyson Felix, the record-shattering brilliance of hurdlers Karsten Warholm and Sydney McLaughlin, the relentlessness of distance runners Eliud Kipchoge and Sifan Hassan, the domination of swimmer Caeleb Dressel and the U.S. women’s basketball, water polo and indoor and beach volleyball teams.
But the legacy of Games, which wrapped up Sunday night with a glittering if disjointed and flat closing ceremony, will also be their failure to connect with the very people hosting them and who now have to pick up their projected $25 billion tab.
The vibe around these Games was as empty as the stadiums and arenas they were held in.
International Olympic Committee President Thomas Bach, not surprisingly, had a different view.
“After we had to accept the decision by the Japanese authorities to have no spectators, I must admit we were concerned that these Olympic Games could become an Olym
pic Games without soul,” Bach said.
“But fortunately what we have seen here is totally different. Because the athletes gave these Olympic Games a great Olympic soul.”
No one more so than gymnast Biles, the biggest star heading into the Games who loomed even larger after them without winning a single gold medal, further establishing herself as the ultimate champion of the #MeToo era.
These Games will be remembered when the Olympic movement was forced to take a long, hard, overdue look at mental health issues in the post-Nassar, post-Karolyi era, a reckoning forced by Biles taking herself out of the team competition citing safety and mental health concerns and her subsequent comments on the issue. She also forced an equally longoverdue discussion at home, finding herself at the center of the latest culture war along the way.
The Olympics bid farewell to two other American women’s icons — quarter-miler Felix and the U.S. soccer team.
Felix, competing in her fifth Games, picked up an unexpected bronze medal in Friday night’s 400 and then returned a night later to help the U.S. claim gold in the 4×400-meter relay. She leaves as the most decorated female athlete in Olympic track and field history with 11 medals, seven of them gold. Only Finnish distance running great Paavo Nurmi from the early 20th century has more track and field medals (12).
With her two medals, Felix also surpassed Carl Lewis’s record for most medals by an American track athlete, and even more significantly continued to raise awareness of issues ranging from equal pay, maternity leave to maternal health in communities of color.
The reigning World Cup champion women’s soccer team struggled from an opening match loss to Sweden and was knocked off by Canada in the semifinal before winning the bronze medal game. While some will argue players were distracted by their ongoing legal dispute over compensation and other equity issues, in reality, unlike Felix, this Team USA, relying too much on aging, pasttheir-prime veterans, simply couldn’t outrun time.
Team USA won the medal count with a late surge, finishing with 39 gold medals, one more than China, and 113 medals total. China had 88 medals followed by host Japan with 58 medals, 38 of them gold.
Australian swimmer Emma McKeon became only the second woman in Olympic history to win seven medals in a single Games, the first since Soviet Union gymnast Maria Gorokhovskaya did so in 1952. On the men’s side of the pool, Dressel raced to five gold medals and was potentially denied two more by a pair of relay debacles.
German dressage rider Isabell Werth became only the third athlete to win gold medals in six Olympics. Japanese skateboarder Momiji Nishiya at 13 years, 330 days is the youngest Olympic champion since 1960.
But the most impressive numbers came on the second week of the Games on the track at Olympic Stadium.
Norway’s Warholm’s 45.94 world record victory in the 400 hurdles is possibly the single greatest performance in the history of the world’s oldest sport.
A day later, McLaughlin lowered her own 400 hurdles world record to 51.46, edging past Dalilah Muhammad in the closing meters of the most thrilling race of the Games.
“Dear athletes, over the last 16 days, you amazed us with your sporting achievements,” Bach said in his closing ceremony address. “With your excellence, with your joy, with your tears, you created the magic of these Olympic Games.
“You were faster, you went higher, you were stronger because we all stood together — in solidarity. You were competing fiercely with each other for Olympic glory. At the same time, you were living peacefully together under one roof in the Olympic Village. This is a powerful message of solidarity and peace.”
The decision by the IOC, Tokyo 2020 organizers and the Japanese government to implement strict restrictions inside the Olympic bubble and keep spectators out of it was largely successful. A relatively small number of COVID-19 positive cases were reported among more than 11,000 athletes. U.S. beach volleyball player Taylor Crabb and American pole vaulter Sam Kendricks, the world champion, were two of the most notable.
But in the press conference and again in his remarks Sunday night, Bach almost immediately came under fire within the Japanese media and on social media for once again appearing tone deaf.
His comments to reporters came a day after Tokyo health officials announced a single-day record of 5,042 new coronavirus cases in the city. Before the Games, local and national health officials feared that the rate of new cases in Tokyo might surpass 2,200.
Bach also has some explaining to do to the IOC’s broadcast partners and corporate sponsors. Bach and the IOC pushed through— some would argue bullied Japanese officials — into holding the Games in the same window planned for 2020 in large part to avoid a refund to NBC and other international networks of more than $4 billion.
Even so, the Tokyo ratings were grim for NBC.
The network’s opening ceremony audience was the smallest in 33 years, down 36% from the Rio opening five years earlier, according to Nielsen. And it wasn’t just NBC. The BBC reported a 39.4% drop from 2016.