In American football, why do most coaches kick on 4th and 2 even if they’re on, say, the other team’s 45-yard line? It’s only two yards! So why punt? Without getting too deep into the football canon, the answer is easy: it offers stability and certainty.
Why do most lawsuits settle instead of going to trial? Because a jury trial is risky. Settlement offers a known deal: stability and certainty.
What is one of the most famous aphorisms that as children we all come to know and understand? A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. Or, as Thomas Bach, the president of the International Olympic Committee, has famously put it, “In German, now it is better to have a small bird in your hand than a big bird on the roof.”
This is why the Tokyo 2020 Summer Games have been rescheduled to a date certain, the opening ceremony now set for July 23, 2021. The Paralympics will be Aug. 24-Sept. 5.
The image the IOC used Monday to illustrate the announcement of the July 23, 2021 start date of the Tokyo Games // Getty Images
Amid the coronavirus pandemic, do we know that by July 2021 the pandemic will have run its course? No. Life is itself uncertain.
But the decision offers stability, and — right now — in the Olympic universe, and beyond, two things are essential.
One, everyone needs to know what is what so that plans can be made. Athletes, coaches, governing bodies, national Olympic committees, sponsors, fans, the literal billions around the world who can look forward to next July.
Two, from the IOC’s perspective, and if we are being honest, likely well beyond, the Tokyo Games are, more than ever, set up to potentially be that “beacon of hope.”
It’s OK to be a professional skeptic. That’s what journalists are trained to do. All good. But it’s also OK to acknowledge as well — there’s often not enough of this in journalism — that there’s a place for hope and dreams, and that we need those qualities in our lives, too.
The IOC is the farthest thing from a perfect vessel for hope and dreams. It is an easy, and sometimes more than appropriate, target for criticism. But it is also in charge of what Bach has in recent days called, and aptly, the most complex event in the world.
Half the world, nearly 4 billion people, watches the opening ceremony of that most complex event, the Summer Olympics. There’s sound reason. The Olympic Games are different than anything else.
Bach said in a statement released Monday, “Humankind currently finds itself in a dark tunnel. These Olympic Games Tokyo 2020 can be a light at the end of this tunnel.”
Time, as ever, will tell. In the meantime, Olympic stakeholders immediately made clear that certainty and stability were a most desirable value.
World Athletics: “We support the new 2021 dates for the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games announced today by the Japanese organizers and the IOC. This gives our athletes the time they need to get back into training and competition.
“Everyone needs to be flexible and compromised,” apparently meaning ‘willing to compromise’ in American English, “ and to that end we are now working with the organizers … on new dates in 2022” for the world track and field championships in Eugene, Oregon.
The president of the world aquatics federation, Julio Maglione: “Faced with the unprecedented need to reschedule the Olympic Games, our friends at the IOC and Tokyo 2020 have reacted with great speed and professionalism. To already know the dates is very helpful to federations and athletes everywhere.”
FINA is almost surely going to have to move the dates of its July 15-Aug. 1 2021 world championships, set for Fukuoka, Japan. To when? Now the planning can begin.
Modern pentathlon president Dr. Klaus Schormann, in a statement on behalf of that federation, which goes by the acronym UIPM:
“On behalf of our global community I congratulate our partners at the IOC and Tokyo 2020 on this swift confirmation of new dates for the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games from July 23 to August 8, 2021.
“I believe this is the best possible outcome in the circumstances. Our National Federations, athletes, coaches and their support teams all now have the certainty of knowing they have 16 months to prepare for the Olympic Games.”
Some journalists immediately found fault with the IOC decision, among them my longtime friend Christine Brennan. She argued Monday in her USA Today column that now is the wrong time to announce July 23, 2021.
I demur.
So that everyone understands: Christine and I have been friends for more than 40 years. We are both from Ohio, have each covered at least 10 editions of the Games and, along with others you surely would know, are proud members of the same graduating class at the Northwestern journalism school. For emphasis, this is no hot-take special; this is a point of respectful disagreement between friends.
Christine’s argument is that the IOC is “tone deaf” in proceeding Monday to announce the July 23, 2021, date — that it “should have stayed silent and waited” to announce that new date “when we can see the light at the end of the tunnel’ (there’s that tunnel again) in what she calls “a few more weeks.”
Except that flies in the face of how the human mind works.
We need — we crave — certainty and stability.
It was just a few days ago that the IOC was being criticized around the world, sometimes savagely, for not announcing the postponement. And now it would be criticized for the certainty of announcing a new date? This is from the can’t-win-for-losing department.
Rana Foroohar writes the Swamp Notes column for the Financial Times with Edward Luce. On Monday, Foroohar wrote of recently learning of some fascinating research about the way people deal with anxiety:
We human beings can deal with large stressful events — if, that is, they are expected.
What we don’t do well with is uncertainty.
As the research indicates, Foroohar wrote, “Most of us would rather receive a single large electric shock, for example, if we know it’s coming, rather than wait for one that might be smaller and that may or may not come.”
She then wrote, “Sadly, that’s exactly where we are right now — waiting for ill-defined, mostly negative externalities …”
Or, to quote the former U.S. defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, in his famed Feb. 12, 2002 briefing, which Foroohar does, a piece of prose that has since been turned into verse in the 2005 collection by Hart Seely, “Pieces of Intelligence: The Existential Poetry of Donald H. Rumsfeld”:
The Unknown
As we know,
There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.
We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don’t know
We don’t know.
We don’t know a lot of things right now. But now we can know the Tokyo Games are due to start July 23, 2021.
In her column, my friend Christine quoted an epidemiologist and professor of law and medicine who asked, among other things, “If they put it on the calendar, they have to be prepared to perhaps move it a second time because we just don’t know when it will be safe enough to proceed. Could it be in 12 months? Possibly, but are you going to take a big bet on that? Because that’s what the IOC would be doing …”
Exactly.
If the IOC needs to confront that possibility, that’s for then — that is, to deal with unknown unknowns if and when they become known.
This is now. We know what we know, now. And — since both Christine and I have been privileged to report from so many editions of the Olympics, we both know this — the IOC’s role, at its best, is to inspire and, to reach back to its catchphrase from some 20 years ago, to celebrate the best of who we can be.
There is a place for that, more than ever. In essence, this is what the IOC knows it knows.
So the time to say when that will be — July 23, 2021 — is, once more, now. Not just because the IOC can. Because it should.