The COVID-19 pandemic continues to cast a giant shadow on the opening of the Tokyo Olympic Games. With less than a month left, anxiety over the possibility that foreign athletes and journalists could be carriers of the emerging deadly Delta variant has been added to the hosts’ long list of concerns.
While the ban on all foreign spectators and a 10,000-person cap on live audiences at the various venues has clipped revenue expectations, sponsors hope that this would be offset by millions of fans following the games on television and live streaming platforms.
Observance of tight health and safety protocols and restriction of the movement of athletes and journalists to defined ‘bubbles’ has been announced by Games officials as these two groups of participants have started to arrive in Japan. They are required to undergo quarantine and testing before they are permitted to acclimatize themselves to the competition venues. GPS trackers are being utilized to ensure that they do not violate the mobility limits.
Moreover, up to 80 percent of those expected to be housed in the Olympic Village will be vaccinated.
The International Olympic Committee (IOC) and participating delegations have offered to field more doctors, nurses and paramedics in order not to unduly burden the host country’s health system. Only recently, a new spike in COVID-19 cases reportedly overwhelmed hospital facilities in Osaka, Japan’s second largest city.
But those wary of worst-case scenarios have not folded their tents. Hence, the Games’ promoters have not gone beyond making cautiously optimistic announcements in order to avoid a public backlash.
Truly, this is a most extraordinary and unprecedented development in the history of the Olympic Games. Originally scheduled in 2020, host Japan sought a year’s postponement, in the hope that the pandemic would ease, but to no avail.
Recall that in 2016, the staging of the Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil was also clouded by the threat of the Zika virus. That threat turned out to be minuscule compared to the COVID-19 pandemic that has struck hardest in the United States, India and Brazil --- and has claimed nearly 3.9 million lives.
The Olympics is not just the summit of global athletic achievement; it is also a mirror-reflector of the unfolding of human history.
Reader’s Digest has recorded the following milestones associated with the Olympics: first female athletes (Paris, 1900); African-American Jesse Owens’ track records (Berlin, 1936); participation of wheelchair athletes (London, 1948); first-time coverage on commercial television (Rome, 1960); Black Power civil rights protest (Mexico, 1968); terrorism and murder of Israeli athletes (Munich, 1972); African nations’ boycott (Montreal, 1976); US boycott (Moscow, 1980); professionals’ participation (Barcelona, 1992); North and South Korean unity (Sydney 2000).
Playing in the Olympics is every athlete’s lifetime dream; winning Olympic medals represents a pinnacle of achievement that is celebrated by nations.
In its determination to see this quadrennial event through in the face of a lethal contagion, what is Japan’s Olympic dream for posterity?