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.