Even in (finally) arriving at the right choice by postponing 2020 Olympics, actions of top U.S. and IOC officials were inglorious

Now that sanity has prevailed, and the 2020 Tokyo Olympics have been moved to 2021 because of the coronavirus pandemic (but will still be called the 2020 Tokyo Olympics in the International Olympic Committee’s parallel universe), what can we take away from the way the decision was reached and about its ramifications?

A handful of thoughts:

1.  The IOC’s abysmal handling of its messaging over the last month will be a case study in how not to do public relations.

What was being discussed behind the scenes among the IOC and the Japanese government and Olympic organizers makes no difference.  The IOC’s public statements for the last several weeks were a mix of disingenuousness, falsehoods and callousness toward not only the athletes it swears are its primary concern but to the suffering world at large.

Running a global enterprise from its new Taj Mahal of a headquarters in Lausanne, Switzerland, the IOC showed a painfully narrow sense of perspective.

IOC President Thomas Bach’s having said that the words “postponement” and “cancellation” were not even mentioned during a March 4 meeting of the IOC executive board defied credulity, sounding irresponsible at best and an outright lie at worst.  Saying last Tuesday that talking about alternatives was “counter-productive” while exhorting athletes to “continue to prepare. . .as best they can” was both tone-deaf and insensitive.

Those indefensible statements spurred strong reaction from athletes and national officials who called for postponement.  Both groups were flabbergasted and exasperated that the IOC persisted so long in its “The Games Will Go On As Scheduled, Take It Or Leave It!” stance.   Even after using the word “postponement” for the first time Sunday, the IOC left athletes confused and hanging by saying it might take four weeks to make a decision that was announced Tuesday.

As Johannes Knuth wrote in an excellent Monday column in Germany’s Suddeutsche Zeitung newspaper, that IOC resistance to the athletes’ resistance turned the situation into a disaster for Bach, a 1976 German Olympic gold medalist in fencing.  Bach long has decried how West German officials strung along their athletes before deciding to join the U.S.-led boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics, only to have his IOC do the same with a similar decision in 2020.

“Forty years after Moscow, it is the athletes who boycotted his course to host the Summer Games in Tokyo in July 2020,” Knuth wrote, adding, “It all sounds very familiar. . .only that the athletes' spokesman from the past is now on the other side.”

2. To the end, the IOC tried to spin its mishandling of the situation.  Its Tuesday joint statement with the Tokyo organizing committee gave no credit to the athletes, sports federations and National Olympic Committees who had chosen common sense over a common voice.  It cited the World Health Organization’s Monday assessment that the pandemic is accelerating as the sole impetus for the postponement.

Yes, the IOC had to do a delicate pas de deux to ensure it did not seem to be forcing Japan’s hand, as was clear when Abe said Tuesday he had called to suggest postponement to Bach.  But referring to the impact of the athletes only in reference to the impact the virus has been having on their preparation shows the IOC’s frequent insistence that athletes are at the center of everything it does is just plain meaningless.

Global Athlete, the new international athletes group that urged the IOC to hasten its decision, said in a statement Tuesday, “While we commend the International Olympic and Paralympic Committees and the Tokyo 2020 organizing committee for coming to this called-for conclusion, they must now engage athletes and athlete groups to be a part of the planning for the forthcoming Tokyo Games.  As shown over the past several weeks, no athletes, no Games.”

The professional track and field athletes group The Athletics Association, presided by two-time Olympic triple jump champion Christian Taylor of the United States, polled its members and then released last week results from 4,000 respondents worldwide. Seventy-eight percent said the Summer Olympics should be postponed.

Asked whether the IOC failed to give groups like his enough credit for influencing its decision, Taylor said via direct message, “I am more focused on the decision to postpone and have considered that a victory in itself.”

3.  If anyone showed less common sense and less willingness to take a stand than the IOC, it was the leadership of the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee, chief executive Sarah Hirshland and board chair Susanne Lyons.  They walked in lockstep publicly with their Swiss masters.

In the defining moment of their tenure to date as the top USOPC officials, Hirshland since August 2018 and Lyons since January 2019, both failed to show any courage of conviction compared with their counterparts in several other countries.  Even their Monday statement about favoring a postponement was mealy-mouthed.

“I don’t need to make a headline to communicate with Thomas Bach,” Lyons told the New York Times.  “I have his cellphone number.”

Sorry, Ms. Lyons, no matter the substantial lobbying of the IOC for postponement you and Ms. Hirshland did privately, this was the time when you needed to make a statement to a U.S. public whom you pitch for donations and to the U.S. athletes whom you allegedly speak for.  And the other defense of namby-pambieness you gave to the New York Times, of not wanting to sound like a bully because of the United States’ size and the financial contributions from NBC and U.S.-based global Olympic sponsors, is utterly specious.  A well-crafted but pointed statement could have avoided leaving such impressions and not have had the USOPC overplaying its hand, as it has done in the past.

Was one of you hoping that if you played nice, Bach would dub you a noble by making you an IOC member?  Sometimes, as Groucho Marx famously said, “I don’t want to belong to any club that will accept me as a member.”

4.  The uncertainty over how long it will take to get the coronavirus pandemic under control means the debate about the viability of the 2020-now-2021-Olympics may not be over.  But postponement to 2021 was the best option.

5.  Numbers compiled by pre-eminent Olympic historian Bill Mallon made it clear why 2021 was a better choice than 2022, at least from the perspective of athletes who were hoping to compete or had already qualified to compete in 2020.

There is no exact comparison, as Mallon noted, but the shift of the Winter Games to the middle year of the four-year Olympic cycle as of 1994 meant only a two-year gap (1992 to 1994) the first time it occurred.

Of the 1,942 athletes who competed in those two Winter Games, 643 (or 33 percent) competed only at Albertville in 1992, and 815 (42 percent) competed at both.

While there is no breakdown of why many did not get from Albertville to Lillehammer in 1994 (Failed to qualify? Injury? Family or career reasons?), it seems obvious that a shorter gap will benefit “2020” athletes.

As Mallon also points out, the number of repeat Olympians over history, when the Winter and Summer Games each normally had a four-year gap except for the one winter instance, has been about 27-28 percent.  He estimated that the one-year gap would “perhaps” allow 50-to-60 percent of the likely 2020 group to be at the Olympics in 2021.

6.  You have to say “likely” 2020 group because, according to an IOC statement last Tuesday, just 57 percent of athletes already had qualified for the Games.

Among those whose trials were yet to come were U.S. athletes in three sports they dominated at the 2016 Olympics: track and field, swimming and women’s gymnastics.  In the case of track (Eugene, Ore.) and swimming (Omaha), those trials were both planned as week-long events involving literally thousands of athletes, coaches and officials, so rescheduling involves some of the same issues as rescheduling the Olympics, like hotel availability. (There were 1,052 competitors at the 2016 U.S. track and field trials; 1,740 at the 2016 swimming trials.)

7.  Dates for the Summer Games in 2021 are TBD, with the only sure thing that they will take place “not later than summer 2021.”  (That’s the northern hemisphere summer.  We often forget our good friends in the antipodes, southern Africa and several South American countries, including Brazil and Argentina.)

There apparently is some sentiment for having the Tokyo Games now begin in May rather than the original July 24 – Aug 9 schedule, especially because the Tokyo weather would be significantly cooler than the often extreme heat and humidity of late July and August.

From a TV broadcaster standpoint, especially as it affects viewership, potential conflicts with the European club soccer season of 20/21, the rescheduled European Soccer Championships, the NBA, the French Open, Wimbledon and the U.S. Open golf all are factors mitigating against a start before late July.

8.  While this seems trivial to those who think major swimming and track events take place only at the Olympics, the issue of rescheduling the biennial aquatics and track and field world championships scheduled for 2021 is of substantial consequence to those international federations and their athletes.

The track worlds are scheduled to be in Eugene, Ore. – the first time ever in the United States – Aug. 6-15, 2021.  The aquatics worlds, including swimming, are to be in Fukuoka, Japan, from July 16-Aug. 1, 2021.

Expect the track championships to be in 2022 because historical Eugene weather conditions make early August by far the best time to have them.  Since all aquatics events but open water swimming and high diving take place indoors, they could take place at a colder time of year In Japan, even late fall 2021, with the outdoor events moved to a warmer location.

9.  Keep this in perspective, as athletes seem to be doing almost universally, even as you also feel sympathy that a once-every-four years or once-in-a-lifetime or final chance to be in the Olympics may be gone for some:

Only during the two World Wars were Olympics not held as scheduled, with cancellations of the 1916, 1940 and 1944 Summer Games and the 1940 and 1944 Winter Games (the first Winter Olympics were in 1924.)  That they now have been postponed says as well as anything that this coronavirus pandemic is World War III.

10.  The IOC got one thing right when the final words of Tuesday’s joint statement explained the Olympic flame that arrived in Japan from Greece last Friday will stay there to stand as a “light at the end of the tunnel in which the world finds itself at present.”

Overblown, romantic rhetoric?  A bit, sure.  But it echoes what I wrote – or overwrote, if you want - after running a leg of the torch relay near Oslo in 1994 and what I paraphrased last week, why I still love the Olympics despite the doping and the rampant commercialization and the political infighting and the out-of-touch, pompous panjandrums who run them.

There is a magic that can occur when briefly, ever so briefly and ever so rarely, Olympic athletes carry the torch for humanity.