Opinion: Are Tokyo Olympics destined to be a disaster amid COVID-19?
TOKYO – The once-postponed, much-discussed, long-awaited, overbudget, extraordinarily controversial 2020 Tokyo Olympics are finally upon us.
The Games do not officially begin until Friday night’s opening ceremony, but we already know they will forever be known as the COVID Olympics.
COVID-19 attached itself to Tokyo's Olympics in March 2020, forcing the first postponement in the history of the Olympic movement. Since then, the virus has never let go, creating headlines to this day about positive tests in the Olympic Village and altering the landscape of these Games with so many layers of safety and security that they are almost unrecognizable.
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Certainly, no Olympic Games has ever gone through more to get to the starting line, and no Olympics has ever looked quite like this.
One wonders if it all will be worth it. Those polled in Japan have consistently answered with a resounding “No.” Perhaps they are right. Perhaps not.
The answers will start to emerge as the Games begin with an opening ceremony in a crowdless stadium – a made-for-TV event if ever there were one, with a smaller contingent of athletes marching in and waving to mostly empty seats – but they might not be fully known until months or even years from now.
Will these Olympics, bringing together more than 10,000 athletes from 206 countries, become a superspreader event, depositing disease and perhaps even death here in largely unvaccinated Japan?
Or will they instead bring a sigh of relief and perhaps even a hint of joy to the host nation and to the world, showing that athletes can come together in relative safety and harmony while the pandemic rages in so many corners of the globe?
That option seems remote at the moment. The run-up to these Games has been nothing but trouble, even as most athletes, coaches, officials and members of the media have successfully entered Japan and are going about their lives as best as they can in the midst of massive pandemic restrictions.
But these are an Olympics cloaked in fear, as if around every corner, more bad news awaits. It seems that anything that could go wrong might go wrong. The constant drumbeat of positive coronavirus tests from the Olympic Village is a striking example. Getting through the next 17 days unscathed seems as if it will take some sort of sports miracle.
“It’s really hard to think about something that would make you happy about the Olympics at the moment after all the big controversy and arguments and negative discussions,” Shinsuke Kobayashi, managing director of the Olympic and Paralympic news office for Japan’s Kyodo News agency, said in an interview in the Main Press Center this week.
“In the short term, excitement might occur and people will enjoy watching TV, cheering the athletes, and it might have a bit of an Olympic atmosphere. But I am worried about what will come afterward, and then we will have to think hard what these Games were. Of course it will be recorded in the history why we had the Games and why it turned out to be like this. We will have to have a lot of thinking afterward. It’s a sad situation.”
At some previous Olympics, public discontent about the Games gradually dissipated as spectators attended events and gathered in public squares to watch on big-screen TVs. This time there will be none of that; the public can neither buy in nor join in these Games.
So the only thing that can save these Olympics is the performance of the athletes themselves. Could COVID-19 take a back seat to memorable moments on the field of play? International Olympic Committee President Thomas Bach believes the athletes are ready to burst out to produce those results, having waited an extra year for the opportunity.
“I know how much they are longing for this moment,” he said, “that they can finally be there and enjoy this moment under very special circumstances and a feeling of relief. I don’t need to tell you the road to this opening ceremony was not the easiest one.”
Bach called the eve of the Tokyo Olympics “a moment of joy and relief.”
If he is in fact right, we shall see how long it lasts.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Are 2021 Tokyo Olympics destined to be a disaster amid COVID-19?
