Even so close to Opening Ceremony of Tokyo Olympics, there is time to avoid having fools rush into decision on their fate
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A recent protest against having the Tokyo Olympics this summer.
Thrift, thrift, Horatio!
The funeral bak'd meats
Did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables.
--Hamlet, Act I, scene 2
As of early this week, there were 3.3 million deaths worldwide attributed to the Covid-19 virus.
And yet the Japanese government and the International Olympic Committee continue to set the tables for a July global party that 59 percent of the Japanese population wants cancelled, according to polling done last Friday through Sunday.
In that poll, postponement was not an option. Another poll in April showed 70 percent of the population wanted the Tokyo Summer Games either cancelled or postponed again, as they had been from 2020 to 2021.
Make no mistake about it: the Tokyo Olympics are in essence a shindig, a giant, made-for-TV, ATM of a sports festival, sort of a wedding reception on steroids. And think of how many wedding receptions and family celebrations have been cancelled or postponed in the face of a pandemic still raging out of control in some of the world’s most populous countries, notably India and Brazil.
The preparations and regulations necessary in the hope of keeping the Olympics from becoming a feast for the coronavirus mean they will be essentially a joyless party, a wedding with no food or dancing, a festival without the cultural interactions that are supposed to make the Olympics more than just another sporting event.
No foreign spectators. Maybe no domestic ones, either. Strict distancing and masking rules. Little freedom of movement for everyone directly involved.
Is that the youth of the world assembling to celebrate the Olympics, as called for in the ritual appeal at the Closing Ceremony of the previous Games? Only if they stay two meters apart.
It would be foolish, of course, for the Tokyo Olympic Organizing Committee and the IOC not to continue planning, as the 2020/21 Summer Games are apparently going to take place, no matter that Japanese authorities have extended a pandemic state of emergency until at least May 31 – less than two months before the July 23 opening ceremony.
And there is nothing inherently wrong about top officials of both organizations expressing confidence that they can pull off these Summer Games in a safe atmosphere, without potentially deadly consequences.
What is wrong is the hubristic arrogance with which that confidence has been expressed.
The latest overbearing blowhard is IOC vice president John Coates of Australia, who also is chair of the IOC’s coordination commission for the Tokyo Olympics.
(Let’s not forget that Mr. Coates also is the guy who offered the national Olympic committees of Kenya and Uganda $35,000 apiece the day before Sydney won the 1993 IOC vote to host the 2000 Olympics over Beijing by two votes. Coates told the Sydney Morning Herald the money was offered because "I thought it was necessary for us to show our commitment to those NOCs with a view to winning those votes.")
Over last weekend, Coates told reporters the Tokyo Summer Games were “absolutely” going ahead.
I guess Coates never has heard the old Yiddish expression, “Man plans, and God laughs.”
Either that or Coates thinks he is divine, which would not be an unwarranted self-aggrandizement in the minds of many in the IOC.
Oh, Coates did admit that the growing opposition to the Games among the Japanese public is “a concern.”
worldometer’s graph of coronavirus cases in Japan.
And every time some Japanese government official or health official has raised doubts about the wisdom of going forward with the Games, the organizing committee Poobahs-in-Charge would take a break from making sexist comments to push back hard against the legitimate doubters.
Yes, there is a lot of money at stake, which is the elephant in the room in determining whether the Games should go on. That recalls the bitter irony in Hamlet’s statement: it was not only about having the same food at his mother’s wedding to the man who killed his father as had been served at his father’s funeral, but also about the killer’s knowing he could save money by using the leftovers.
There is no doubt the Japanese public wanted the 2020 Olympics when the IOC chose the host city in 2013. A Japanese government poll taken a week before that vote showed 92 percent support for having the Olympics.
Support lessened, but not dramatically, over the next several years, when the budget turned out – like most Olympic Games budgets - to have been calculated by Pinocchio.
How nearly all Japan felt in 2013 (or even in pre-pandemic 2020) is utterly irrelevant.
The polls say that most Japanese feel very different today (and if you doubt the results of these recent polls, why not question the 92 percenter, too?) Japanese tennis stars Naomi Osaka and Kei Nishikori both said this week that more discussion is needed on whether the Olympics should take place, given the level of discomfort about the idea in Japan.
With tight entry controls to the country of 126 million inhabitants and a long-held national feeling of doing what is best for the common good, Japan has so far had impressive success in slowing the spread of Covid.
The worldometer coronavirus statistics show Japan has recorded 645,817 cases and 10,941 deaths. Its number of cases per million people is 2.8 percent of that of the United States; its number of deaths per million is 4.8 percent that of the USA’s.
Yet the numbers have been going steadily up in two of Japan’s three largest cities, Tokyo (1) and Osaka (3), over the past month, leading to the states of emergency in both places. According to stories in the Asahi Shimbun newspaper, Tokyo recorded its highest number of Tuesday cases in three months, while Osaka Prefecture recorded Tuesday its deadliest day in the pandemic.
And, given the recent polling, it is evident much of the Japanese public is frightened about the impact of having some 20,000 foreigners (athletes, officials, media) entering the country for the Olympics.
The IOC president, Thomas Bach, took Japanese officials’ advice to postpone for an undetermined period a planned mid-May trip to Japan. So, just to make sure I understand: one person should stay away now, but tens of thousands are okay two months from now?
For a number of reasons, including no domestic vaccine production and lengthy processes for approval of foreign vaccines, Japan’s vaccination rate is abysmally low – just 2.8 percent of the population has been vaccinated, just 1.0 percent fully vaccinated, according to New York Times figures.
Assessing blame for that slow rollout is a meaningless exercise as it relates to having the Olympics. It is what it is: another apparent factor in the apprehension of the Japanese public.
To be dismissive of those fears by effectively screaming “damn the torpedoes, full steam ahead” is both morally reprehensible and insulting. So is the idea of transferring needed medical personnel from their current stations in hospitals near the breaking point with Covid cases to work at the Olympics. Both positions are like being told, “You don’t like it? Tough.”
Could the Games be postponed another year at this point? The IOC and Japanese authorities have said no, but their initial reaction to any change was similar in March 2020, when the first questions arose about the fate of the 2020 Tokyo Olympics.
Postponement to July of 2022 would cause more logistical scrambling and conflicts with some other major sporting events. But by coincidence, there would be no conflict with the world’s second largest sporting event, the 2022 men’s soccer World Cup, because it does not begin until Nov. 21, a schedule reflecting health concerns about the triple-digit summer temperatures in the host nation of Qatar.
Postponement has to be considered again. So does cancellation, should the global course of the pandemic or its national course in Japan fail to improve in the next month to six weeks. Even with things as they stand today, what is the point of shoving them down the throats of a Japanese public that keeps saying clearly to pollsters it does not want the Summer Games in 2021?
Stories posted Tuesday on Asahi Shimbun web site.
Forget the specious argument that if other sporting events are going on, so can the Olympics. The Olympics are larger than any other event that has recently taken place by exponential orders of magnitude, and they involve people from every part of the world, so the challenges of staging them safely also are exponentially larger.
Japan’s prime minister recently has said the IOC has the ultimate say on the fate of the Games. That is buck passing 101. No matter what the host city agreement mandates about who has the power to say no, what sovereign government would turn over a decision of such national importance to an outside sports body, especially one that answers to nobody but itself?
Certainly, cancellation will be a wrenching experience for the athletes who plan their lives around the four-year Olympic cycle. Only the truly heartless would feel no sympathy for them if the plug is pulled.
But think of how many joyous events have been stripped from others around the world in the past 14 months: graduations, weddings, grandparents kept from seeing new grandchildren, families separated at holidays – all in the interest of public health.
And all those things are of little consequence in the big picture. People without jobs. People who may suffer for years after having contracted the virus. People who have had to mourn lost family members and friends from a distance. People who had died alone because it wasn’t safe to be near them. People being cremated round the clock in Delhi after having died of Covid.
Three million, three hundred thousand dead.
Not one more should die as a result of having the Olympics in 2021. That is the real bottom line.
I have covered 19 Olympics. By personal choice, they occupied nearly all my professional life for nearly 40 years.
I have seen how special they still can be, what joy they can bring to participants and chroniclers and spectators, even with their doping, gigantism, financial excesses and the easy corruptibility and sometimes hardened venality of many among the self-important windbags who run and organize them.
I have seen the Olympics carry the torch for our better angels.
Trying to have them this summer seems more like a deal with the devil. It would be selling off what little remains of the ideals, real or contrived, followed or ignored, that once were the Olympics’ moral underpinnings, their philosophical heart and soul.
It says in the Olympic Charter, as part of the “Fundamental Principles of Olympism,” that one of those principles is social responsibility.
