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Will the 2020 Tokyo Olympics be held in 2021?
That was the plan, after the International Olympic Committee and Japan, the host country, postponed the games last March due to the pandemic. But with the coronavirus still in many parts of the world, and the reality that the global vaccination campaign will take time, the question of whether it is possible to hold the Olympics safely this year is resurfacing.
A report in the London Times kicked off the latest debate, with an anonymous high-ranking member of Japan’s ruling coalition saying that the Japanese government had privately concluded that the games would have to be canceled. “Nobody wants to be the first to say it, but the consensus is that it is too difficult,” the source said, according to the Times. “Personally, I don’t think it’s going to happen.”
But Olympic and Japanese officials were quick to deny those reports, insisting the games are still continuing.
The Japanese government called the reports “categorically false”. “I am determined to hold a safe and secure Tokyo Games as proof that humanity will have overcome the virus,” Prime Minister Suga Yoshihide told his country’s parliament on Friday, according to the Washington Post.
The International Olympic Committee echoed Suga. “All parties involved are working together to prepare for a successful Games this summer,” the IOC said in a statement.
Thomas Bach, the head of the IOC, told Japan’s Kyodo News that his committee is determined that the Olympics continue as scheduled, starting July 23. “That is why there is no plan B and that is why we are fully committed to making these games safe and successful,” he said.
The Olympic Games debate is far from resolved
This is just the beginning of an intense back and forth over the 2020 or 2021 Olympics.
The games were postponed to the end of March due to the inability to hold a mass meeting that summer. Closures in countries around the world shut down training facilities and disrupted qualifying events, leaving athletes stressed and uncertain about the possibility of competition.
Much has changed in one year. Scientists and public health officials have a better understanding of the coronavirus and have a better idea of how to contain it. Yet even countries that have done better than others in controlling the pandemic continue to face dangerous outbreaks, including Japan. Tokyo is in a state of emergency as it faces its latest and deadliest pandemic wave.
Mary E. Wilson, a clinical professor at the University of California, San Francisco and visiting professor at Harvard University, told me in March that the Olympics are basically the “ideal setting” for something like the coronavirus to spread.
Even if things are under control in many places, bringing people together for the Olympics could help reignite the infection in many other places. ways, ”Wilson said.
The arrival of multiple vaccines offers a way out of all of this, but the operational and logistical challenges of the global immunization campaign mean that the world is realistically not emerging from the pandemic any time soon.
Japan, host of the Olympic Games, has 127 million citizens to vaccinate; As the Associated Press reports, getting shot in the arms of everyone might be the only way to organize games in a truly safe way. But the vaccinations have not yet started and won’t start until the end of February.
Added to this is the appearance of new variants of the coronavirus, which appear to be more contagious. There is also the question of how they will interact with the new vaccines.
Although July is still months away, the Olympics are not exactly an easy operation to carry out at the last minute. Last year, some athletes criticized to the IOC for insisting that the games would go ahead, which to many seemed completely disconnected from what was happening around the world. And that uncertainty: should they try to train or not to train? – added to the frustration.
Eventually, the Olympic committees of individual countries began to remove their athletes from the games, leaving the IOC no choice but to postpone the games. On this occasion, no country has yet announced that it will attract its athletes, but some leaders, including Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison, have expressed doubts about Japan’s ability to run the event.
The United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee said in a statement that it had not received any news “to suggest that the Games will not go as planned, and our focus remains on the health and preparation of Team USA athletes. Before the Games this summer. “
And sports have resumed in many parts of the world, although some are safer than others. International athletic competition has resumed, with no fans and other restrictions, though nothing on the scale of the Olympics. And even then, Covid-19 usually manages to infiltrate.
The Australian Open tennis tournament, which officially begins next month in Melbourne, chartered flights for the players and their entourages, who come from around the world, and then required players to self-quarantine upon arrival. Some ended up having to face longer periods of isolation because, you guessed it, some of the people on those chartered flights tested positive for Covid-19. At least one player did too.
Australia will allow some fans to attend this year’s Open, with restrictions. But Melbourne has also eliminated Covid-19 through some of the toughest restrictions in the world.
When it comes to the Olympics, postponement is not appears to be an option this time around, which means that it is much more likely that if the relevant parties finally decide that it is too risky to hold the games in July, the 2020 Games could be canceled for good. That only happened a few times before, in 1916, 1940, and 1944, all due to the world wars.
Japan spent approximately $ 25 billion to host the Olympics. Even if the country can host the games in the near future (the sites are already set up for 2024, in Paris, and 2028, in Los Angeles), a cancellation could make it difficult for Japan to get a return on that investment.
Athletes, some of whom get only one or two chances at the Olympics in their entire career, may not have another chance to compete if the 2020 Games are canceled. Simone Biles, USA Gymnastics member and the most decorated gymnast in the story, he told NBC Today is the show on Friday that he hopes the Olympics can still continue, even if they are in a bubble, a reference to the NBA’s strategy of isolating and testing athletes and coaching staff, who played games in an empty arena.
“Whatever they say they want us to do, I’m 100% because I’ve been training very hard and I’m very prepared,” Biles said.
The stakes are high at these Olympics – for the athletes, for Japan, and in a way, for the world itself. Yes, it’s a bit cheesy, but as I wrote last March, the Olympics could be exactly what the world needs when it emerges, hopefully, from a pandemic. Olympic ideals – fair competition, solidarity, goodwill – can be the antidote to a world that feels like it’s falling apart, even if the games can’t be played this summer.
More than a year after the pandemic, it feels truer than ever.
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