Category Archives: tokyo olympics

Carry on?

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As a journalist, my job is to be skeptical but not cynical. As something of an Olympic patriot, furthermore, I don’t want to be too judgmental about whether the Tokyo Games should be carrying on as the pandemic surges again; whether the absence of spectators renders the event nothing more than a studio TV show; whether NBC, corporate sponsors and the International Olympic Committee have prioritized financial gain over the health of athletes and the Japanese public; whether it is time to consider doing away with the Olympics altogether.

But it was New York Times columnist Frank Bruni, I believe, who said the responsibility of a journalist is to wonder and worry and poke and prod. So, here goes.

Even amid the usual athletic drama and skill playing out—compelling attractions, for sure—it is not possible to ignore so many of the Olympics’ 21st Century ills currently on display, beginning with the organizers’ deaf ear to overwhelming public sentiment against soldiering on.

Virus positives (predictably) had eliminated two dozen Olympians, including teenaged tennis star Coco Gauff, days before the Games started. With fans (wisely) barred, the all-too-common post-Olympic uselessness of excessively expensive arenas, White Elephantism, already has set in. The Atlantic described the Opening Ceremonies, typically an uplifting kickoff to the quadrennial 17-day international festival, as a “mournful mishmash…that only emphasized its dark context.”

There is a stark reminder of doping issues as Russia has fielded more than 300 competitors who somehow managed to dodge an international sports ban on that nation for systemized drug use in recent years. A judo player from Algeria has been dismissed for refusing to compete against an Israeli, and a second one from the Sudan sent himself home for the same reason.

Having covered 11 Olympics, I long ago came to the conclusion that the Games are too big, too expensive, too political, too corporate, too prone to cheating and insider deals among IOC officials and authoritarian leaders. But, too, I came to accept what John MacAloon, Chicago philosophy professor and Olympic historian, articulated two decades ago: “We can’t eliminate all the problems. That’s why the Games are interesting. They’re life itself. If the Games were more pure and perfect, they’d be less appealing. They mirror not just a dream version of life; they also mirror the things we struggle with as ordinary human beings. None of us lives a dream. We live messy, ordinary lives.”

Skeptically but not cynically speaking, then, the argument that the Olympics—now 2,813 years since the first Ancient Games—is worth keeping is the (not always realized) ideal of seeking global understanding. Sort of the United Nations in sneakers. MacAloon again: “Sports in service of intercultural communication and a better world.” Not the worst ongoing experiment.

During the 2000 Sydney Games, Australian psychologist Amanda Gordon offered her sense that having the Olympics in town was “a way for people around the world to learn about each other. You see these athletes do something terrific and you say, ‘Where’s Bulgaria? Let’s have a look on the map. What do they like to do? What do they like to eat?’ From that point of view, the Olympics is extremely important. It says, ‘Let’s get together.’”

The great Norwegian speedskater of the 1990s, Johann Olav Koss, argued that the Olympics is “for peace. It’s for education. It’s for health. It’s to reach absolutely everybody in the world to understand how to win, but also how to lose and how to respect everyone.”

A major problem with the Tokyo Games, of course, is that while roughly 11,000 athletes from 200-plus countries are on site, Covid protocols have dictated that there is no world there. There is no international crowd, stoking the fire. Performances feel forced—barely more than practice sessions.

Perhaps my most memorable evening of Olympic coverage came in Sydney, when the raucous involvement of 112,000 shrieking spectators was as much a part of the show as a handful of excruciatingly tense track and field finals. Australia’s Cathy Freeman stood her nation on its head with a come-from-behind 400-meter victory; American Michael Johnson won a second consecutive Olympic men’s 400; American Stacy Dragila outdueled Aussie Tatiana Grigorieva in the first Olympic women’s pole vault; Romanian Gabriela Szabo edged Ireland’s Sonia O’Sullivan in an exhausting 5,000, after which neither woman could summon the strength to raise her arm to acknowledge the cheering; Ethiopia’s Haile Gebrselassie won the 10,000—6.2 miles—of step-for-step dueling with Kenya’s Paul Tergatby by less than one second.

In each case, who was carrying whom—the athletes straining with the weight of expectation on their backs or the fans desperately, vicariously trying to lift them—wasn’t clear, but it was incredibly noisy business. The athletes, winners and non-winners, later remarked on the “energy in the stadium;” how “you can’t find words to describe this crowd;” how “the adrenaline in the place was amazing.”

So television now can show the world’s best athletes running, jumping, throwing, swimming, kicking, skateboarding, surfing and so on. But a viewer can’t feel the Olympics without an in-person audience. Television can’t conjure the typical Olympic scene beyond the playing fields—a diverse picnic in countless languages, an amusement-park ride in which the riders really are half of the amusement.

Stripped of that mix—no fault of Tokyo’s organizers—this Olympic recess (however brief) from the world’s troubles is left feeling too close to the 11 o’clock news. Overwhelmed with reports on all that’s wrong with the Modern Games.

Should that mean that Tokyo ought to be the last Olympics? Especially since a major focus on the upcoming Winter Games, to be hosted by Beijing in 2022, so far has been on China’s human-rights violations and its anti-democratic bent—and whether Western nations therefore should consider boycotting?

No clear answers will be forthcoming here. It’s important to acknowledge that, despite plenty of journalistic skepticism, I’ve found covering the Olympics to be culturally enlightening, competitively dramatic and generally great fun. Higher, faster and stronger than everyday stuff.

Really?

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A good Latin phrase always is handy for extraordinary Olympic moments. (The Games official motto is in Latin: citius, altius, fortius—faster, higher, stronger.) So, in regard to the Florida official who has volunteered his state as alternative host of this summer’s coronavirus-threatened Tokyo Games, I suggest non compos mentis.

The translation is “Not in control of the mind” or, less formally, “insane; mentally incompetent.” Though etymologists aren’t in full agreement about the exact origin, one theory is that non compos mentis evolved into “nincompoop.”

That seems about right for the classically blockheaded offer, sent to the International Olympic Committee in a letter by Jimmy Patronis, who is Florida’s chief financial officer. In what must be described as nothing more than a publicity stunt, Patronis announced that, since Tokyo’s nabobs appear to be hesitating about going ahead with the Olympics in the face of the pandemic, the Sunshine State is ready to step in.

The headlines produced by that cockeyed suggestion, Dave Zirin and Jules Boykoff wrote in The Nation, “looked like something out of The Onion.”

Patronis, oblivious to reality on several levels, argued that, while Tokyo organizers had chosen to postpone last summer’s originally scheduled Games for one year, Florida went about staging the NBA playoffs in the Disney World Covid-19 bubble. And Tampa is about to pull off the pandemic Super Bowl. And there have been several Jacksonville-based UFC events during the plague. (UFC events!)

Patronis is a finance guy; I got a C in my college economics course, so what do I know? Except that, in the process of covering 11 Olympics, I became aware that the Summer Games consist of 33 sports, requiring such diverse facilities as a swimming hall, track and field stadium, equestrian venue, cycling velodrome, rowing site, shooting and archery ranges, multiple soccer fields, separate arenas for fencing, gymnastics and badminton. And much more.

There are 206 Olympic nations eligible to compete in the Games; compare that to the measly 193 countries in the United Nations. Roughly 11,000 athletes—as well as coaches, game officials and physicians—must be fed and housed and transported to both competition and training locations during the Games. Logistics and details are such that cities are designated Olympic hosts seven full years in advance of the 2 ½-week international festival. One decision-maker at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics said the task amounted to “putting on a Super Bowl every day for 17 days.” In fact, it’s more complicated than that.

Another minor detail, spelled out in the Olympic Charter, is that the IOC “shall have no financial responsibility in respect to the organization, financing and staging of the Olympic Games other than the contribution determined in the Olympic Host Contract, unless otherwise agreed in writing.”

So, while recent polls have found that 80 percent of Japan’s population favors cancelling the Games altogether, Tokyo has sunk about $25 billion into its operation, a major factor in opting to (fingers crossed) soldier on. That Florida would have the resources, the time or the ability to waltz in as Olympic savior—let alone to get the IOC’s backing—is “bonkers,” Smith College economist Andrew Zimbalist told the Huffington Post. “This is an idiotic, delusional, uninformed, ignorant Florida politician trying to put his name out there. It’s got no chance. It’s just stupid.”

Humor columnist Dave Barry’s sly take in the Miami Herald was that “chief financial officer Jimmy has already done the hard part, writing the letter. All we need now is a detailed plan and thousands of workers and $25 billion.”

Money issues and crushing deadlines aside—July 23 is designated as the Games’ opening day—there remains the primary problem of the still-spreading, mutating virus. Patronis portrayed Disney World as “an incredible model for how to run a complex organization in the midst of Covid-19.” (Hmmm: A Mickey Mouse Olympics?) He apparently is ignoring the fact that Florida has had more virus cases (1.7 million to 99,000) and deaths (26,000 to 880) than Tokyo.

Daytona Beach News-Journal columnist Mark Lane dismissed Patronis’ Fantasy Land proposal as  a “cheesy bit of hype” that “also demonstrates a more depressing truth—that the state continues to do everything in its power to minimize the seriousness of [the deadly] illness…”

The Patronis angle does sound familiar, in a way. Quid me anxius sum?

Which is Latin for “What, me worry?”

Olympic fever?

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Danger always is lurking at the Olympic door. Mexico’s government troops gunning down protesters days before the Opening Ceremonies in 1968. The Palestinian attack on the Israeli team compound in 1972. Massive debt for Montreal in 1976. Politically engineered boycotts in both 1980 and ’84. A deadly bomb during the Atlanta Games in 1996. Salt Lake City’s post-9/11 jitters in 2002. Fears of oppressive Chinese Communist censorship in 2008. Brazil’s mosquito-borne Zika virus in 2016.

The sky forever seems to be falling. With buttoned-up security, the Olympics go on—and with a remarkable ability to create a festive, peaceful island in an increasingly chaotic world. Not since 1940 and 1944, during World War II, have the Games been cancelled.

But what about this summer’s Tokyo Olympics as the coronavirus radiates from its outbreak in China, across Asia and now into Western nations? The Olympics not only is a hothouse for public dissent (because it is such a visible stage) but also for germs (because so many people, from everywhere, are packed together for three weeks with not enough rest and too much contact). Personal experience: Head colds and viral infections marched through the press facilities at all of the 11 Olympics I covered.

So far, Tokyo officials, who estimate welcoming 11,000 athletes and 600,000 overseas visitors, are insisting there is no Plan B—no thought of calling off, postponing or moving the Games. That, despite news that pre-Olympic qualifying events already have been moved out of China and other Asian venues, affecting athletes from several countries. Quarantines of potential Chinese Olympians have forced disruption of those athletes’ training or cancelled their pre-Olympic competitions. Schooling planned in Japan for 80,000 unpaid Olympic volunteers, hailing from around the world, has been delayed.

Japan already has the highest number of confirmed coronavirus cases outside of China, and the March 1 Tokyo Marathon, which normally has more than 30,000 mostly-amateur runners from home and abroad, will restrict its field to roughly 200 elite professionals. Possibly all wearing surgical masks.

The coronavirus reportedly is related to SARS, the deadly severe acute respiratory syndrome which broke out in China in late 2002. That contagion forced the relocation of the 2003 women’s soccer World Cup, a high-profile 16-nation tournament that had been scheduled for four sites in China, to six cities in the United States.

The move worked, in part because of the Americans’ experience in hosting the previous World Cup four years earlier. So now Shaun Bailey, a London mayoral candidate, has suggested the 2020 Olympics likewise be transferred to his city, which staged the 2012 Games.

Except there is a marked difference between transporting a one-sport championship tournament and the massive Olympic show, with its 33 sports and 30 times the number of participants. Organizing the Olympics, a 1996 Atlanta official said at the time, amounted to “putting on a Super Bowl every day for 17 consecutive days.”

In fact, it is bigger than that. And getting bigger all the time. For Tokyo, 7.8 million tickets have been sold. More than $3 billion in local sponsorship deals have been finalized. NBC has paid $1.4 billion just for U.S. broadcasting rights (with the significant expectation that the Games will fit into its summer programming window before American football and baseball playoffs take over). More than 80,000 hotel rooms are in the mix. Organizers have spent about $25 billion on their Olympic operation.

For obvious reasons, Tokyo wants—and needs—to stick to its schedule. And the history of Olympic perseverance, in the face of multiple challenges, is exceptional. But the 2020 prognosis is iffy.