Coming after the second World War, the 1948 Olympics in London were known as the austerity games. Moscow in 1980 is popularly remembered as the boycott Olympics.
LA in 1984 is famed for somehow turning a profit. Tokyo 2020 starts a year late on Friday and is notable even before it has begun for a sense of something almost sinister.
Rather than anything to do with the Olympic spirit of participation, these 16 days of competition are largely going to be an exercise in stoicism.
There will be the usual stuff about winning and losing being some grand redemptive rebuff to a virus that has consumed the world over the past 18 months. And there is little doubt but that these games will throw up spectacular performances from figures most of us previously had little clue about.
The baleful reality is that the authorities in Japan have one hand tied behind their backs when it comes to the health of their own population
But if Tokyo 2020 gets to the August 8th finish-line without disaster it won’t be a matter for celebration so much as relief it’s just all over.
That’s because these are the absurd games. They are an exercise in greed that is the very opposite of what the Olympic movement says it is about on the tin. It says the essential thing is not to conquer but to fight well.
Tokyo is stark evidence of perspective and good sense having been conquered by corporate hubris.
How else to explain up to 20,000 athletes, not to mention those accompanying the greatest show on earth, being dropped into the Japanese capital which is in a state of emergency due to a rapid rise in Covid-19 cases. Infections rates are at their highest since January. That such a dire scenario could unfold was obvious long before that.
Vaccination rates
It has been repeatedly established that a large majority of the Japanese people want the games cancelled once more. Vaccination rates in the country are at 20 per cent. That isn’t as low as many other countries but lags behind rates closer to home.
Yet Japan is in a position where it is getting visitors from almost every country on the planet for an event most of its own people don’t want.
One might imagine that such popular feeling might have an impact on the democratic process. It is after all the people of Japan who are in the firing line. Not unnaturally, they are mostly more worried about public health rather than the outcome of the modern pentathlon. You would think their public representatives have a stake in taking that into account.
But the baleful reality is that the authorities in Japan have one hand tied behind their backs when it comes to the health of their own population. They are in the contractual grip of the International Olympic Committee. A private entity with a tawdry history of expediency and cynicism is effectively telling a democratic government what to do.
Since that government could reportedly end up sinking almost $35 billion into this debacle it has skin of its own in this game. But it is doing so with the IOC at the helm. It has long been a bad Olympic joke that host cities get stuck with the cost of staging games that are a cash-cow for the IOC in terms of media rights and commercial sponsorship deals. But this is a dark punch-line.
Contractually the IOC is in command. It is their show. They have cancelled once. They’re not going to do so again. Even with some insurance cover in place it has been estimated they have $5 billion on the line if it doesn’t go ahead. So they are holding the Japanese authorities’ feet to the fire. Live up to the contract even at the risk of the event turning into a super-spreader.
There are parts of that contract that allude to cancellation in the event of certain unlikely and dangerous circumstances. But apparently a global pandemic doesn’t qualify under either count. At best it is horribly skewed in terms of priorities. It doesn’t require too much standing back either to suspect something dark and subversive about it all.
A private body effectively holds all the legal cards over a city engaged in a public health battle.
A contract signed in 2013 must be adhered to or else. There is an argument to suggest it is just sabre- rattling and unlikely to happen.
But the shadow of that “or else” hangs like a pall over every other consideration about these games.
Astonishing
It is an astonishing situation for the authorities in Japan to find themselves in, trapped in the sort of corporate and bureaucratic logic that gets tied up in a pretty ribbon but unravels in the face of reality on the ground. Nevertheless they have decided, apparently through gritted teeth, that they have to press on regardless.
The result is a travesty of what the Olympics are supposed to be about. There has always been a yawning gap between their aspiration and practicality. Expediency has almost always emerged victorious no matter what the circumstances. But the coming weeks look set to make a mockery of the ethics of global humanity that supposedly underpin the whole thing.
It might be possible to quantify the impact on the safety of the athletes there. So too with the cost of under-pressure healthcare professionals in Japan forced to cover for this travesty. However the more intangible implications for the IOC could ultimately prove very expensive indeed. It might have won this game of corporate hard ball but at a serious long term cost.
Because even if Tokyo by chance and good fortune takes place without a serious setback it will recognisably be a triumph for the unscrupulous. Sport is ultimately supposed to be about fairness. And even by the shoddy standards of the Olympics it’s impossible to see anything equitable, never mind honourable, about the resources being put into something so ominous.
