Every day, those of us whose lives are in some way shaped by the Olympics get asked the same question — is Tokyo going to happen?
Let’s be clear. despite any fantasy to the contrary, I am in no way, shape or form an Olympic athlete. I could blame the two shoulder surgeries in the past seven months but, nah. Not even a working left shoulder would make me world-class in anything except maybe this — typing and thinking and, believe me, many of my critics and detractors would say I am farthest thing from, and thanks as always for your thoughts and prayers.
So with admiration for the thousands of athletes whose hopes and dreams have been on hold for the past year — absent something freaky between now and July 23, freaky in this context meaning apocalyptic, there will be Games in Tokyo.
As IOC spokesman Mark Adams said Wednesday in a video press briefing, “We are confident we can deliver good Games and we will continue working toward that.”
Mark Adams during Wednesday’s IOC briefing
The end of the briefing — purportedly for credentialed journalists — was disrupted by a protestor, identified as a “David O’Brien from Yahoo,” who instead held up a black-and-white banner and yelled, f-bomb and everything, that there should be no Olympics in Tokyo or Los Angeles or, for that matter, anywhere.
Adams, sanguine, said, “I’m quite used to this.”
These few weeks before the start of an opening ceremony are traditionally the time when the most vocal opponents of a Games rise up and become even noisier. On cue, here they were this week, not just at IOC briefings but in the New York Times and elsewhere.
This is like the 17-year emergence of the cicadas, completely predictable, except that it’s every two years, Summer and Winter.
But this is different.
Is the situation so problematic that even Hello Kitty and Super Mario have by now turned their backs on the IOC?
Following on from Rio — yes, there was PyeongChang in 2018 but, Winter, whatever, for a good part of the world — the IOC may well find itself at a generational inflection point, running now a genuine risk of brand and reputational damage.
As the great American executive Jack Welch once said, “When the rate of change inside an institution becomes slower than the rate of change outside, the end is in sight The only question is when.”
He also said, “Leadership, very simply, is about two things: 1. Truth and trust. 2. Ceaselessly seeking the former, relentlessly building the latter.”
And one more: “Change before you have to.”
The only thing the IOC has is the Games, really.
The reality, with 10 weeks to go until the opening ceremony is that the good people of Japan — famous for unending joy, optimism and hospitality, all of it wrapped up in the Japanese expression omotenashi — increasingly have expressed not just doubt but serious concern about what’s what. Maybe even despair.
Not good.
Eight years ago, when Tokyo won the right to these Games, it seemed we would all deplane to images of cherry blossoms and to flag-waving Japanese youngsters beckoning hello like long-lost friends welcoming you to a small, family-owned sushi restaurant.
Now?
Is it possible the most uplifting thing to look forward to this summer will be a flash of one’s QR code? Will anyone be allowed to venture out to buy a fridge magnet or a tea towel?
The most important person at this Games, it may turn out, is what’s being called the CLO — Covid Liaison Officer.
Gawd — another Olympic acronym. COVID is already an acronym. We have an acronym for an acronym. When will this music stop? And these Games haven’t even begun yet!
But — to be sure — they will.
Perhaps, once the ceremony kicks off, things will get back to what typically happens at a Games — the spotlight will shift to the sports and to the athletes, the feel-good nature of the Games will overcome the unrelenting beat of the build-up of months of negativity.
The IOC is eternally in crisis management. But this — this — is manifestly a different sort of crisis.
To be painfully obvious, the overriding issue as July 23 and the approach of the opening ceremony is the worldwide pandemic.
Not to put too fine a point on it but — for the let’s-believe science crowd — let’s say you are the U.S. team. Or even our fine Canadian neighbors. Or even any of our accepting, sensitive, western European friends. And then friends from India get put next door in the Olympic Village.
Just to complete this hypothetical: in this scenario, everyone, even the Indian team, is vaccinated.
Someone, let’s face it, is gonna get put next to the team from India.
And the team from Brazil.
In both countries, the virus is raging. As it is in many places in our world.
As a side note — can you imagine if these Olympics were being held in Rio this go-around? Ha.
Human beings are interesting creatures. Facts are supposed to matter. Science! But in a situation like this — hi, friends from New Delhi and Mumbai, here are your accommodations — is it more likely that facts rule the day, or emotion?
This — this — is the situation the International Olympic Committee is confronting. Managing emotion. When it’s trying to present fact.
The IOC had for months sought to say that emotion — bringing the world together, being a light at the end of the tunnel — was the raison d’être of the Tokyo Games.
We haven’t heard much of that lately.
Instead, it has been mostly been, with reliance on the “playbooks” and stats and stuff — facts — about how the Games will be safe.
There are three core reasons — facts — these Games are going to go on, and nobody in any position of influence is under any illusion otherwise:
1. The IOC and its affiliated entities live on broadcast revenues. It needs, they need, the money.
2. Five months after the Summer Games in 2021, which are still going to formally be called the Summer Games of 2020, come Winter Games of 2022. Tokyo first, Beijing next. Japan has already spent $15 billion, more likely $25 to $30 billion, on 2020/1. Beyond, it can hardly afford — literally and figuratively — to cede regional influence to China.
3. The end of Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga’s term is in sight. A positive Olympics would likely translate to votes.
Three weeks ago, Suga was the first foreign leader to visit President Biden at the White House — a clear signal to China of Biden’s intent to strengthen Asian alliances. What Suga wanted from the visit, though, he didn’t get, and this was the part that in the rush to report that Biden gave his stamp of approval to the Games, which the Washington Post and others duly reported, everyone missed: Suga clearly wanted Biden to say he would come to the opening ceremony.
Uh, nope.
The IOC is keenly aware of such protocol hits and misses. Believe it.
Here’s an interesting side question, protocol-wise: will IOC spouses — or, plural, spice — be accredited?
The IOC, meanwhile, is also acutely aware of what it’s confronting over the next several weeks.
Where it has failed, and massively, is in its messaging, leaving Adams, president Thomas Bach and coordination chair John Coates virtually alone in saying the Games are going to happen — and, moreover, that we as humankind, can not only put them on safely (facts) but (emotion) desperately need them to happen.
Is the rest of the entirety of the IOC — members and staff — suffering from chronic fatigue and manic depression?
It’s incredible, really, that the IOC has not marshaled its troops around the world in an effort to promote the Games with a coordinated message of celebrating humanity — that light at the end of the tunnel thing.
That’s what people want to hear.
Where are the Olympic heroes, the athletes of today and yesteryear? Where is a global campaign featuring these icons — in which, say, they declare that Tokyo 2020 will be (truth) the most memorable Games ever … and, along with them, kids, teens, 20-somethings from around the world — the IOC’s target demographic — appearing with excitement and anticipation … and everyone with the same tagline … ‘it’s not just gonna be OK — it’s gonna be epic!’
Because we haven’t had that sort of campaign, what we have had instead is the chaos of a big fat Greek wedding, but without the sweetness of the baklava. And — in true Greek and Olympic style — the ouzo to wash it down and take the pain away.
(For Olympic veterans: where is Gianna?! Mrs. A — all is forgiven!)
Why is this one simple thing — time after time, year after year — so hard for the IOC to understand?
The Games are always — always — about hopes and dreams.
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Some track and field notes:
1.
The U.S. media spotlight found its way last weekend to Walnut, California, and Seattle Seahawks wide receiver DK Metcalf’s effort in the 100 meters. He finished in 10.37 seconds, ninth and last in his heat. Cravon Gillespie won the final, in 9.96.
Good job by Metcalf to promote himself. The Metcalf ’track speed’ T-shirt, with the man himself in a Seahawks uniform, is already for sale. This is what being a professional athlete is all about.
Meanwhile, across the world, on the very same day, at what will be Olympic Stadium in Tokyo — Justin Gatlin, the 2004 Olympic gold medalist and 2019 world champs silver medalist in the 100, was one of only two foreign competitors in the sprints. He won the 100 (in a pedestrian 10.24 in a slow race but who cares).
There’s a reason Justin Gatlin is shrewder and smarter, mentally tougher, than everyone else. When others are maybe uncomfortable this summer in Tokyo, Gatlin will be the one guy who already will have had a leg up on what it’s like to be there, eat there, sleep there — all the things that he can then reduce to background noise.
Oh, and Christian Coleman, who won the 2019 100, is ineligible.
2.
Nothing is a certainty at any Olympics. But Joshua Cheptegei of Uganda is on a mission to win the men’s 5,000 and 10,000 meters.
He’s — how to say this delicately — not very happy that he was not named the 2020 World Athletics male athlete of the year. He set world records in both races last year.
3.
Some of the times already early this season have been crazy fast.
If a slew of records goes down at the Games — akin to the insanity at the 2009 world swim championships in Rome, a circus that saw swimmers in plastic suits set 43 world records — there will be a very good reason why.
It’s the shoes.
When you marry carbon-fiber plates and super-springy foam, you get super-fast times.
World Athletics is in a bind. The times bring attention to the sport. But the times also ask what’s real, and what’s the shoes.
These promise, indeed, to be the most memorable Olympics — ever.