When I was a boy growing up in the cornfields of Ohio, my younger brother and I thought one of the greatest days imaginable was riding our bikes the several miles to the Ben Franklin five-and-dime store, there to peruse the comic books, to see what might have come in since our last check-in.
The summer before I turned 11, drama! DC Comics created Earth-Two, a parallel world. This allowed them to publish Superman stories without regard for the line of Superman tales that had developed over decades.
A fresh start, if you will.
Imagine if in our Earth-Two the International Olympic Committee had 1/ a more nimble communications department and 2/ could thus tell the story it should be telling in a world in crisis because of the coronavirus.
Tokyo and 2020 — the situation is, to be gentle, uncertain, and who can believe the stats there because who knows how many people, if any, are being tested? Beijing 2022 — here is a country with more than 3,000 confirmed dead. Paris 2024 — the country is on lockdown. Milano-Cortina 2026 — Italy has now surpassed China in the number of dead, more than 4,000. In a poignant reminder of how the crisis is more than just numbers, in a story written by Andrew Dampf of Associated Press, 2018 snowboard gold medalist Michela Moioli’s grandmother is dead after being infected with the virus and her grandfather, after testing positive, is in the hospital. Moioli and ski gold medalist Sofia Goggia played a key role in last year’s winning Milano-Cortina presentation to the IOC.
To complete the Games line-up: Los Angeles 2028 — more than 40 million people in California are on lockdown.
IOC president Thomas Bach at a news conference earlier this month in Lausanne // Flickr
The president of the IOC, Thomas Bach, should say, simply, something like this:
“The Olympic Games are special. We love them. But we are all, humankind, united in an unprecedented situation.
“We want to be part of the solution.
“If that means having Games, then, together, that’s what we should do.
“If that means doing something for the betterment of the world, we’re all in.”
Then Bach would say:
“Tokyo can and should be one of the greatest Olympic Games ever, the ultimate celebration of humanity.
“At this moment, we don’t exactly have a Plan B. We’re asking for your understanding and some measure of patience. We’re working on it. We understand it’s unsettling not to know, especially when so many people have made so many plans. So we will get back to you, with transparency about what is happening and why and how, and with as many details as we can share, just as soon as we can. We promise.”
Reality:
The IOC has to be working on it.
It’s right to keep pressing forward toward July 24, the Tokyo 2020 start date, on the chance it might — say, might — happen. As noted in prior columns, the IOC has typically dealt with any manner of pre-Games crises. But each day that passes makes a July 24 start look more and more unlikely. So, of course, there has to be in development a Plan — or Plans — B.
It’s just the way the IOC is getting there that is so perplexing, and for so many.
And because its messaging is, as ever, so confounding, it leaves so many people deeply unsettled when they want reassurance, literally thousands of whom are not just dependent on the Games for thousands of reasons but, this is as or more important, profoundly emotionally invested — the wishes upon stars, the hopes and dreams rooted in the aspirations and ideals the movement stands for.
Here is what we know.
As Bach said in an interview with the New York Times this week, cancellation is off the table.
The way the IOC works, you can bet he went public with that only after sending a letter saying exactly the same thing to various Olympic stakeholders.
So let’s proceed with the assumption that, for real, cancellation is not an option.
That means postponement is Plan B.
If it weren’t, Bach would be a fool.
You can say a lot of things about the IOC president.
He is nobody’s fool.
And, as he said in that NYT Q&A, the IOC is “considering different scenarios.”
The IOC said in a Tuesday communique that any speculation at this point would be “counterproductive.”
Sure, but this ignores reality.
It’s of note that USA Swimming and then USA Track & Field have written letters seeking postponement. Those play primarily to a domestic audience and for a multiplicity of political reasons may or may not impact much if at all on the IOC but, rather, the U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Committee.
It is of real merit that the likes of Erik Kynard, the London 2012 silver medalist, was willing Saturday to get on a phone call and declare, “I am a high jumper. I have zero access to any apron or pit,” adding, “The current state of the world is not one that I don’t think would be in the best interest to allow the Games to proceed as scheduled. Fans included. I’m being honest.”
Or that Wallace Spearmon, fourth in the London 2012 200 meters on the track, one of the sport’s most thoughtful guys, said, also in a Saturday call, “Athletes want to compete. But not at the risk of losing your life.”
Bach, a gold-medal fencer in 1976 in Montreal, understands — truly understands — what the Olympic moment means for each and every athlete. He was robbed of the Moscow 1980 experience by the U.S.-led boycott. Put this next piece whichever way you want: He has never forgotten. He always remembers.
Bach is assuredly determined to make sure that the athletes of the world have their Olympics.
Thus the question: when?
A key variable is that, just as Sochi 2014 was closely identified as Vladimir Putin’s Games, Tokyo 2020 is Shinzo Abe’s, the Japanese prime minister’s. Abe lobbied the IOC in 2013 to vote for Tokyo; Abe appeared in a bit at the closing ceremony in Rio in 2016; the Japanese have spent at least $12 billion, perhaps as much as $25 billion, readying for these Games.
Put bluntly: for Shinzo Abe, the Games cannot be a mammoth failure. Just — cannot.
On Monday, Abe appeared to open the door to some flexibility in timing.
“I want to hold the Olympics and Paralympics perfectly, as proof that the human race will conquer the new coronavirus, and I gained support for that from the G-7 leaders,” he told reporters after a videoconference among those nation’s leaders.
Here on Earth-One, that clearly was a signal to the IOC. No mention of July 24.
So what are the options?
One fascinating idea is to push back everything — everything — by four years.
In this scenario, Tokyo would get 2024, Paris 2028 and Los Angeles 2032.
This column has said many times that Paris for 2024 was always going to be extraordinarily difficult. Now all the more so.
One keeps in mind that last year the 2024 organizing committee rejected a 100-million euro sponsorship deal with the oil company Total because the mayor of Paris did not want fossil-fuel companies involved in the Paris Games; Paris 2024 needs about $1.3 billion from French businesses to meet its revenue targets, and now the clock is ticking; given the way the virus has crashed markets worldwide, would four more years necessarily be such a bad thing?
Maybe four more years, 2028 for Paris, is Earth-Two thinking. That is, a fantasy. It’s a fact that 2024 is the 100th anniversary of the 1924 Games there, and it would take a lot — a lot — to budge the French off that. Then again, 2032 is the 100th anniversary of the first Games in LA.
So maybe this sort of Earth-Two thinking — a fresh start — would be invaluable.
Would it be hard politically? Assuredly. Do unusual circumstances demand unusual thinking?
Or, thud, back to Earth-One.
What about this fall in Japan? Say, October?
Pro: Same year (obviously), meaning (potentially) fewer sponsor issues. Example: Delta Air Lines is due come Jan. 1, 2021, to become the “inaugural founding partner” of LA28 and a “supporter and partner” of the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic teams. United had long been the USOPC’s — traditionally the USOC’s — airline sponsor.
Con: Television didn’t work out as well in Sydney 2000 because a September Games conflicted, among other things, with the NFL, and the NFL now is a way bigger property than it was 20 years ago.
Plus, the biggest, and most obvious problem: if you’re going to give yourself a margin, how do you know the crisis will have passed by fall 2020?
What about 2022?
One of the lessons of journalism is that it’s dangerous to say never and always. All the same, when it comes to 2022 the instinct is to say no way.
It’s not just there would be two versions of an Olympics that year, Winter and Summer. That’s wrong. There would be three.
The Beijing Winter Games are on for that February. Then (under this scenario) Summer Games in July. Then the Youth Olympic Games in Dakar, Senegal, due to run from Oct. 22-Nov. 9, and the IOC is for the first time substantially involved in the organization of that event.
Moreover, beyond (purportedly) three versions of the Olympic Games, 2022 features both the Commonwealth Games and the Asian Games. Scoff if you must at either but the Asian Games in particular is an enormous undertaking, the 2018 edition in Indonesia drawing 11,300 athletes with 465 events, as many athletes — if not more — than a Summer Olympics and for sure way more events. The notion of rescheduling the next one — set for Hangzhou, China, in September 2022 — seems far-fetched.
Consider, too, that athlete experience. In the life of a world-class athlete, two years can be a l-o-n-g time. The stories of those on the 1980 U.S. team who failed to qualify for 1984 by margins of hundredths or tenths of a second are, decades later, harrowing still.
From the vantage point of March 2020, two years out surely seems too long.
That takes us to 2021.
The issue there would seem to center on two world championships: swimming and then track and field.
The FINA world championships are set to begin July 16 and run through Aug. 1, 2021.
The World Athletics championships are due to run Aug. 6-15.
Riffing here, if the Games were moved to 2021, and started on July 23 (they always — here the always would seem OK — start on a Friday night), that means they would end on Aug. 8 (they always — same — end on a Sunday).
This means the swim — technically, aquatics, because the first week of the FINA championships involves diving, artistic swimming and open-water — and track schedules would have to be juggled a bit to fit.
Let’s try a better word: bookend the Games.
For the swim community, the bonus — the 2021 FINA championships are due to be held in Fukuoka, Japan. So those world championships could be a lights-out prelude to an Olympics.
Track and field is due to be staged in Eugene, Oregon. Since track is always the last week of the Games, the attention — the spotlight — that falls on those athletes could roll right over to Eugene.
Maybe, for once, some Earth-Two thinking could help out track and field here on Earth-One.
Win-win for everyone.
Even, if they could just get their messaging straight, the IOC. Nobody is asking Bach to be Superman and save Planet Earth. Hardly. But to get to what he wants — for that matter, what almost everyone is asking for, an Olympics that is, genuinely, a celebration of humankind — the suggestion here is that going forward a change in tone and style in the way he and the IOC address this unprecedented situation might, in a world that needs it, go a long, long way.