Eight Months Later and With the Tokyo Olympic Less Than a Year Away Russian Has Been Again
S o how was it for you? Whether you loved or hated them, you have to acknowledge these Olympic Games were a crazy proposition. With 206 competing teams, they were bigger and more diverse than the United Nations and – with an estimated neb of at least £12bn, 111% over upkeep – the Japanese could take bought 300 new 300-bed hospitals, or 1,200 elementary schools, with what they cost to put on.
The Games ever accept been, and always will be, like this. Which is why, when the French blueblood Pierre de Coubertin first suggested reviving the ancient Olympics in a voice communication at the Sorbonne in 1892, a lot of the people in the audience thought he was joking.
Fifty-fifty after De Coubertin badgered the Greeks into pressing ahead with the first Games at Athens in 1896, they kept trying to dorsum out of information technology. None of the venues would be ready, the costs were too high, the scale was too large, the whole project was too ambitious. And it notwithstanding feels that way now, 125 years later, when Coubertin's original concept has changed into something else altogether. The sports historian David Goldblatt accurately describes the modern Olympics every bit a "secular commercialised celebration of universal humanity". They are the closest we come up to a global get-together, so large, at present, that the tent even includes room for the people who want to be outside it. The Games have designated spaces for all the protesters who want them abolished.
There are a few more of those at present, in Japan in item. These Olympics have prepare some unwanted records. In the second week daily cases of Covid reached a new high nationwide. More than a third of them were in Tokyo, where the figures have most tripled in the last fortnight. Only 350 or then of those were directly linked to the Olympics but that doesn't count the secondary effects, such as the mixed letters sent by a government that was telling people to stay at dwelling and obey social distancing even while it was holding a two-day national holiday to celebrate the start of the party.
A political party that toll more than $6bn of public money, but which the public themselves could not nourish. You would be angry as well, wouldn't you? That was the saddest part about information technology, all the parents and children waiting exterior the Olympic fences trying to catch a glimpse of what was going on within, the people queuing up to take pictures through the metal netting between them and the Olympic Stadium. Information technology made for some surreal moments, too. On the first weekend the only section of Tsurigasaki embankment that wasn't decorated was the stretch ready aside for the people who had tickets to watch the Olympic surfing.
All those empty stands meant these Olympics lived side-by-side with the promise of the ones they could have been. The decision not to allow in whatever spectators, fifty-fifty at reduced capacity, was all the more puzzling because cinemas and concert halls were all the same open for business around the metropolis. It was a consequence of the push-me pull-y'all political fight between the International Olympic Committee and the Japanese government.
The IOC will scroll on regardless of the damage to its reputation, but like it always does. The Beijing Wintertime Olympics starts in six months and volition bring its ain, entirely new, set of challenges. The Japanese government, on the other manus, may pay for it at the next full general election.
And then what did the Japanese get in return for it all? A tape number of medals and endless hours of content, which they, like everyone else, devoured eagerly. Near days, the Olympic coverage reached more than 85 1000000 Japanese, which is more than 2-thirds of the population. The sport was spectacular, of grade, and a welcome distraction for weary worn-downwards people right effectually the globe. Yous tin can pick your own favourites, whether it was one of the 3 aureate medals Elaine Thompson-Herah won in the sprints, the five Caeleb Dressel won in the Olympic puddle, the one Momiji Nishiya took in the women'southward street skateboarding, or whatever of the 330 other gold medals awarded in the final fortnight.
What it all added up to, whether it was, or always could be, annihilation more than sport, is some other question again. The IOC president, Thomas Bach, insisted the Games had given "hope and confidence not simply to the Olympic movement just to the entire earth". Some were non so sure. "It'south special," said Fiji'south rugby sevens captain Jerry Tuwai after his team had won, "but a golden medal can't supersede a human life." Tuwai'due south teammate Asaeli Tuivuaka spoke movingly virtually what he had been through in the last few months, too. Tuivuaka lost his father during the pandemic, and has a ane‑year-old boy whom he hasn't seen in five months because he has been in lockdown with the rest of the team. "I didn't fifty-fifty become to osculation him goodbye when I left …"
That gets at what turned out to be, for me, the theme of these Olympics. Information technology was there right from the starting time, when Adam Peaty won Bully Great britain's very first gilt medal. Peaty spoke about how he had had to rest training in lockdown with condign a father for the kickoff time. "This last twelvemonth it felt almost similar nosotros were under siege," he said. "There were some days when I woke upwardly and said: 'This is hard, this is really difficult,' there were so many challenges, and some fucking breakdowns as well."
It was at that place when Tom Dean won gold in the 200m freestyle, also, and spoke about how he had been and then sick with Covid that he wasn't certain he would ever make information technology to Tokyo.
It was in the words of the Czech beach volleyball role player Marketa Slukova, who was forced out of the contest when she tested positive for Covid ii days before her opening game. "We cried, then we swore, and so we cried once more."
It was in Tom Daley'southward gratitude afterwards he had won his bronze in the 10m platform diving. "I made it to an Olympic Games afterward 18 months of dubiousness and every single Olympian that is here should be extremely proud of the fact that they made it hither."
And it was, in a different mode, there again in Simone Biles's decision to step back from the Olympic contest. It was there in all the stories about people preparation in garages, roads and back gardens. Y'all could even find it among the weary protestors outside the Olympic stadium, chanting: "No more Games!"
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There is something undeniably silly and self-indulgent in worrying about who'south won what in the middle of the global pandemic, when so much of the local population were and so dead‑prepare against the Olympics. Peaty said information technology himself: "Athletes take to be selfish." But and then one of the defining moments of these Games was when Mutaz Barshim and Gianmarco Tamberi chose to share the gilded medal in the high jump. And listening to all those competitors, from all those countries, share their own stories well-nigh how they – and the people effectually them – have struggled in the 18 months, you felt a kind of kinship with, and betwixt, them.
It was the aforementioned message delivered in dozens of dissimilar languages: this is hard, but we are persisting. And it carried with it a sense of the pandemic equally a problem shared between eight billion people. It felt, and so, like these Games were closer than ever to reaching that kind of universality the IOC aspires to achieve.
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2021/aug/08/tokyo-2020-played-out-in-empty-arenas-but-bound-eight-billion-people-together
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