The American writer F Scott Fitzgerald once wrote that the test of intelligence was being able to hold two opposing ideas in the mind at the same time and still function. With 50 days to go before the Olympics begin in Tokyo, it is simultaneously unthinkable that they will go ahead and unimaginable that they could be cancelled. Does that make Olympic watchers intelligent? Or mad?
Every day seems to bring more problematic news from Tokyo. Covid continues to spread in the city, despite an ongoing state of emergency – which has just been extended. Last week, influential Japanese newspaper Asahi Shimbun published an editorial calling on prime minister Yoshihide Suga to call off the Games. “If the highly divisive Tokyo Olympics are staged without the public’s blessing, what will have been gained and lost?” it asked.
A recent Japanese poll found 83% of respondents wanted the Olympics cancelled or postponed – an increase on the 69% who were against the Games in April. An online petition calling for cancellation is approaching half a million signatures. And yet the International Olympic Committee is intransigent. The Games must go on, they declare. Last week it was IOC president Thomas Bach’s turn to project unwarranted optimism: “We’re entering the final lap ahead of these postponed Olympic Games.”
Asahi Shimbun’s editorial was all the more remarkable because the newspaper is an official sponsor of the Games, reportedly to the tune of $AU70 million. Yet they are willing to write that off, clear-eyed to the challenge of hosting the Olympics as the pandemic persists. Evidently their bean-counters understand the sunk cost fallacy.
But the IOC, with many billions of dollars in the hole, are unwilling to cut their losses. Another senior IOC figure, Richard Pound, recently insisted that “barring Armageddon that we can’t see or anticipate, these things are a go”. On current form, one imagines that even an apocalypse would not dissuade the IOC from hosting the Games. Cockroach long jump, anyone?
Australia’s athletes remain mentally distanced from this turbulence. Ask Olympians for their thoughts on the possibility of cancellation and the answers are unwavering: in their heads the Games are going ahead, at least until they are not. Needing to remain laser-focused in training with just seven weeks to go, most Olympians have tuned out the noise. Ignorance is bliss. They are freshly vaccinated (most got their second Pfizer jab this week) and ready for pre-Games training camps or last-minute selection events.
And so, to Tokyo we go. Barring a volte-face from the IOC in the next 50 days, the strangest Olympics in history will take place. In the Games’ pantheon, it will surely rank alongside the Nazi 1936 Olympics in Berlin. Those Games immortalised the words of American Olympic Committee president Avery Brundage, who blithely insisted “politics has no place in sport”. How long until Bach or Pound proclaim that the pandemic had no place in sport?
In the face of such widespread Japanese resistance, the IOC are pinning their hopes on it working out. If the Games go off with minimal Covid spread, the athletes take centre-stage and there are plenty of sporting headlines, collective amnesia may well set in. After the stress and anxiety of the past 15 months, the several billion people who tune in to each Olympics will no doubt gladly consume this television spectacle. The IOC is rolling the dice in a high-stakes game, but it remains possible that the bet will pay off.
Yet the organisation’s stance – Olympics or bust – remains stark. In the context of ongoing human rights concerns over the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing, Bach observed that the IOC is no “super world government”. It is certainly acting like one. Under the host city contract, neither the Tokyo or Japanese governments have any contractual ability to call the Games off. When four in five Japanese don’t want the Games to happen, insisting that they must – on pains of a multi-billion dollar compensation bill – has real hostage-taker energy.
In the essay where Fitzgerald made his famous observation about contradictory views, he went on to say: “One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise … I saw the improbable, the implausible, often the ‘impossible,’ come true.” Hosting the Olympics – an event which brings together about 80,000 athletes, coaches, officials and media from every corner of the globe – in the middle of a pandemic certainly seemed hopeless. If the IOC can pull off the Covid Games, they will have made the impossible come true. But at what cost?
