The International Olympic Committee put out a self-styled “communique” Tuesday that was really long but can be reduced to the three main points in one essential paragraph.
One, the IOC “remains fully committed” to Tokyo 2020. The Games are due to begin July 24.
Two, because there remain four months to go, there is “no need for any drastic decisions at this stage.”
Three, “any speculation at this moment would be counterproductive.”
IOC president Thomas Bach at a news conference in Lausanne, Switzerland, earlier this month // IOC / Flickr
To get to three first, good luck trying to hold back the speculation. We — all of us — live in an uncertain world made all the more uncertain, extraordinarily so, by the coronavirus.
Things are not normal. They’re not likely to be normal for some time. Yet we all want normalcy, familiarity, stability, certainty.
So, naturally, there’s going to be speculation. Here in the United States, millions of us are under lockdown and sports has all but shut down. When will basketball start again? Baseball? Who knows? What comes after spring? Summer obviously. What’s the big event this summer? It’s only natural to speculate: will the Olympics go on, as planned?
Turning then to two.
The IOC is 100 percent right to declare there’s no need now for any drastic decision.
July 24, for American audiences, is more or less NFL training camp time. The Major League All-Star Game would have come and gone. It’s a long way away.
Back to an Olympic prism.
It is indeed the case that some athlete training schedules are at risk if not already disrupted. It is also the case that the key issue on the table — July, again, is still months away — is figuring out some if not many Olympic qualifiers, as the IOC communique also references; there are 33 sports with levels of stuff to figure out and it’s not clear there is, or can be, an elegant solution.
It is also the truth — critics will say otherwise but this is so — that IOC financial considerations are not the driver here.
Nor is NBC telling the IOC what to do. That is not the way things work. It isn’t. If the critics want to believe otherwise, anyone and everyone is entitled to his or her opinion. But — straight up, reality check: NBC does not tell the IOC what to do nor does NBC hold that sort of influence nor seek to exercise it.
All of which leads to item one.
Famous last words: for the IOC, there really is no other choice but to go forward.
Unless and until it can’t.
The IOC is ever in the business of crisis management.
This is that.
The IOC president, Thomas Bach, knew that when he sought the job. Did he know when he became president in 2013 the sorts of crises he was going to confront? Sochi 2014 — widespread allegations of Russian doping. Rio 2016 — organizational chaos, to put it gently. PyeongChang 2018 — diplomatic tensions on the Korean peninsula that seriously threatened the Games.
Now this.
Compare this, though, and for that matter recent episodes of crisis management, to the boycotts of 1980, or 1984. Then the IOC, and for that matter the Olympic movement, faced an existential crisis — the very future of the organization and the movement at stake.
This is not that.
And here is where this column is going to take a turn.
You can read elsewhere — many other elsewheres — about the logistical, financial, practical, diplomatic, sporting and, obviously, public health challenges confronting the July 24 start date of the 2020 Tokyo Olympics.
Again, as human beings, we crave certainty. It’s natural to speculate when things are so uncertain.
What’s also certain, meanwhile, is that we need the Olympic Games this summer.
Our world is fragile. This virus has shown how — truly — fragile and, at the same time — again, truly — interconnected we all are. The Olympic Games are the one thing that brings the young people of the world together in a celebration of the best of humanity.
The spotlight at the Games is typically on the likes of Michael Phelps and Usain Bolt, sure. But the best part of any Games is in the quiet and the calm, when the athletes of the world can — as surrogates for the rest of us — break down the barriers that keep us apart and discover that we are all way more alike than we are different, and then go home and share that discovery. It is in the way that discovery ripples out, little by little, person by person, one to one, that the Olympic movement can — does — change the world.
Assuming the public health challenge can be met, and let’s be realistic, it must be met, the IOC is 100 percent right to keep pressing forward.
It is right to keep hope — and dreams — alive.
Now, more than ever, we need to celebrate the best of us. We are all in this together.