The president of the International Olympic Committee has this week wrapped up a visit to Tokyo. The questions this visit raises are profound and go to the core of the Olympic mission, which is — as ever — to be relevant in our fragile and broken world.
The Olympic Games are supposed to be different. They are supposed to inspire. To celebrate humanity. They are not per se a commercial enterprise like the NFL, NBA, Major League Baseball, Premier League soccer or any of dozens of others.
Those leagues are in business to entertain but, more, to make money. The Olympic landscape depends on a revenue component — a significant one, to be sure — but the Olympic Charter, in speaking of “Olympism” as a “philosophy of life,” makes plain that the “goal of Olympism” is to “place sport at the service of the harmonious development of humankind, with a view to promoting a peaceful society concerned with the preservation of human dignity.”
It thus holds that the revenue component must be — per simple and unassailable logic — but a means to an end.
Thomas Bach in Tokyo // IOC / Flickr
IOC president Thomas Bach’s visit to Tokyo suggests otherwise. It is thus dangerously worrisome.
Amid a global pandemic that shows no signs of abating, the IOC president’s visit — intended perhaps to reassure corporate sponsors, government ministers in Japan and elsewhere and, maybe, Olympic officials and athletes around the world — instead came off with one unmistakable message: the 2021 Games are on track to be a made-for-TV event because (and of course this was not said but understood) it’s only if the Games are held that the IOC will capture the billions it is due in its broadcast deals and if it doesn’t get that money, everything — literally, everything — is at stake.
Nearly three-quarters of the IOC’s revenues — 73 percent — come from broadcast monies. Without that cash, it, and all the layers of the Olympic scene that look up to the IOC at the top, might well be in serious trouble.
How are you relevant if you aren’t — around?
The problem, again, is logic: if the Games become only a made-for-TV show, then they are an end, not a means.
Which raises an entirely different problem.
Why are you then relevant? The Olympics are supposed to be — different. Are they? Really?
Because after this Bach trip to Tokyo, it would seem obvious why the IOC is pressing ahead with such resolve. What are its other options? Financially speaking, that is.
But — hard question — is that reason enough?
Meanwhile, the backstory of this trip as well as the bizarro optics it produced made for such high camp, both behind the scenes and in front of the cameras, that Liberace on acid might well have been put out.
Who remembers that in late October Bach was awarded the “prestigious” Seoul Peace Prize? Hearken back to the 2018 Winter Games in PyeongChang, which the Seoul Peace Prize Cultural Foundation called a “stepping stone for peace” on the Korean peninsula and in northeast Asia.
Instead of flying to Seoul, Bach “joined the ceremony virtually from Lausanne,” the IOC also noted, with the award ‘collected on his behalf by former United Nations secretary-general Ban Ki-Moon.
Let’s move now to the hypothetical. Storytelling can sometimes be more interesting that way.
Hypothetically, of course, an IOC president would love to have traveled to Seoul to accept such a prize. Now let’s imagine that you are a former prime minister who is now the president of the organizing committee in, say, Tokyo, and let’s just remember that Korea and Japan have a complicated relationship but, anyway, Japan has purportedly spent some $25 billion (already) getting ready for an Olympics but because of a pandemic those Games have been postponed, and the IOC president had not been to Tokyo since the pandemic exploded in March and you and your country have kept the Games afloat aiming for summer 2021 but now you get word, again hypothetically, that there’s a scenario developing that would see the IOC president come for the first time in months to Asia but not to Tokyo but instead to Seoul — Seoul! — for a “prestigious” award and, what!
So, hypothetically speaking, that must have been fun all around.
The same goes for the moment when Bach, when he was in Tokyo, presented Shinzo Abe, who just recently stepped down as Japan’s prime minister, with the IOC’s highest award, the Olympic Order in gold. Traditionally, this goes to someone like an organizing committee president, ahem, at the end of a successful Games.
Bach awarding the Olympic Order in gold to former Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe // IOC / Flickr
Anyway, here was Bach being seen all around Tokyo with his mask, and the mask had a little black dot on the right side that was emblazoned with the five rings. Mr. President, this is just bad optics. It’s so — unnecessary. You yourself have said, and many times, that voters in democracies worldwide have voted time and again against the Games in referenda because they see the IOC as a symbol of the establishment. That little black dot with the five rings on your mask makes you the very embodiment and personification of that. Didn’t any of your handlers understand that?
Did anyone on your staff bother to ask where that mask — or the dot — was made? Maybe China? (Hello, 2022!) Who did the embroidery work? They were paid how much? Just wondering.
A plain mask would have been so much more than sufficient. When Joe Biden came out two weeks ago for his first speech as president-elect of the United States, he wore a plain dark mask. If that’s good enough for him, you know?
The world wants to see that the IOC, and the Olympics, are relatable — that they’re relevant.
Not better than.
Which leads us back to the underlying challenge.
The strongest evidence that this Tokyo trip was about ends, not means, came from John Coates, the senior Australian IOC member and Bach confidant. Coates heads the IOC’s liaison team for the Tokyo Games.
The subject: athlete stays in the village.
Some context:
“Athletes are at the heart of the Olympic movement,” reads a line in the IOC’s most recent annual report, and a variation of this sentiment can be heard almost daily, if not more often, from leadership in Lausanne.
Is this lip service?
An indisputable consequence of the Games is that they produce global icons like Usain Bolt or Michael Phelps. But those are two names from among the 11,000 or so athletes at a Summer Olympics.
For the vast majority of those athletes, their Olympic highlights are three: 1. marching in the opening ceremony, 2. competing in the event itself, and getting eliminated early, which for almost all ends up being OK because for the rest of their lives they are able to say back home that they are an Olympian and 3. mingling in the dining hall and hanging out in the Olympic village.
It’s point 3 here that bears focus.
Because while the media tends to spotlight the likes of a Phelps or a Bolt, the magic of “Olympism” is the mingling in the dining hall and the hanging out in the Village.
That’s why it’s off-limits to the ladies and gentlemen of the press.
The entire point is for the athletes of the world to meet each other as equals — to talk, to see, to learn from and with each other, to take back home the real lesson of an Olympics, that we are all human beings and that as human beings we are more alike than we are different.
Now for Coates.
Because of the pandemic, Coates told reporters amid the Bach Tokyo visit, “The athletes, once their competition finishes, will have one day, two days and then they will go home. The period of staying longer, in a village, increases the potential for problems.”
Coates was also asked, according to a story by AP’s relentless (100 percent meant as a compliment to my colleague) Stephen Wade, if athletes would be discouraged from sightseeing or, you know, just being a tourist in Tokyo. Any Olympics, as a journalist or broadcaster learns at his or her first Games, is not just about what happens on the field of play — it’s also part travelogue, an opportunity for the host nation to show itself off to the world. For the athletes, it’s a typically once-in-a-lifetime chance to discover that city.
“Yes,” Coates said simply.
What is the IOC now trying to do in Tokyo?
Secure broadcast funding for what in Olympic jargon is called a quadrennium — meaning the 2021-24 cycle?
Relegate the athletes, purportedly the core of the IOC mission, to actors in a made-for-TV play? Amid a pandemic that all but surely will not by July 2021 have run its course globally?
Or celebrate them and provide adequate time, place and manner so the thing can come to life that makes the Olympics different — in the quiet moments over breakfast, in card games in the village lounges, in an awkward “hi where are you from” moment that might, just might, blossom into a lifelong friendship.
How is that supposed to happen if, as soon as you’re done, you’re out, wham bam thank you, ma’am, here’s your Olympic diploma for taking part and be sure to wear your mask on the way back to Haneda Airport? Oh, and have a great life!
The whole thing is just so — worrisome.
One final thought before wondering when the IOC is going to get around to thinking — by itself or under pressure — about 2022. Or moving along to Paris in 2024.
Bach and Coates said they want fans in the stands. That has yet to be confirmed. Bach said he expected a “reasonable number.”
OK. Take a look at this, tweeted out Thursday by the Tokyo 2020 organizing committee.
This is not to be funny. This is deadly serious. If there are going to be fans, there is going to be bathroom usage. Any male who has ever been in a restroom at a stadium knows what an … experience … it can be.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control, in a release issued in September as sports were starting up again here, offered this advice: “Avoid using restroom facilities or concession areas at high traffic times, such as intermission, halftime or immediately after the event.”
In the United States, the situation has for weeks been deemed so severe that broadcasters at college football games — no fans in the stands — have Plexiglas between them in the booth.
Yet here, in this bathroom, there is no Plexiglas between the stalls.
Moreover, is there not even one person at the Tokyo 2020 committee — under the supervision of the IOC liaison group — who understands the concept of “social distancing” for essential hygiene? Does that look like six feet, two meters if you prefer, between units?
United by emotion?! For real. And likely all the wrong kinds.
This is as basic as it gets. If they can’t get this right, what confidence should the reasonable person have that the Tokyo 2021 Olympics can — should — go off as scheduled?
Moreover, why should they be held? The IOC president said during his time in Tokyo: “…to be the light at the end of this dark tunnel.”
That surely would be a fabulous means to an end. But — is that the truth?