Greetings anew from Manhattan Beach, California. And how are things? Thanks for asking! People are sick and dying because of the coronavirus. Also, a chunk of the state — bigger than Rhode Island — is ablaze after a siege of spectacular lightning strikes, some 12,000 over the past week, 100 on Friday; on the ground, the destruction is already savage; the air smoky and unhealthy; beyond, it’s only August and fire season has weeks to go. Meanwhile, the utilities are ordering rolling electricity blackouts. School started again but, you know, not in person so no one is happy about that.
Then there’s the political angst, President Obama finally going off on his successor. Here’s a fact: the selection of California Senator Kamala Harris to be Joe Biden’s running mate makes her the first person in the history of the Democratic Party to be nominated — as president or vice-president — as a representative of a state west of the Rocky Mountains.
We are living in weird times. In all of this, there seems to be an element of the apocalyptic. Even the setting sun is not yellow but an iridescent red. Thus the mind quite naturally goes, especially as the red sun sinks into the Pacific, to matters existential or, at the least, consequential.
The wildfire-related red Southern California sunset over the Pacific Ocean
This has to be said:
Things are not the way they were.
And they’re not — repeat, not — going back.
Ever.
Wishing that things could go back, would go back, to the way they were before the breakout of the pandemic is the worst sort of wishful thinking.
The sooner we all wrap our minds around that notion, the sooner we can start getting to the way things are going to be for the future that awaits all of us.
The past is gone. All we have is the present and the future, today and tomorrow.
As Portuguese Football Federation chief executive Tiago Craveiro told Xinhua News before Sunday’s 2020 UEFA Champions League final, arguably the single biggest soccer club game of the year — a 1-0 Bayern Munich victory over Paris Saint-Germain before no fans at Benfica’s Estádio da Luz in Lisbon — the coronavirus “puts all us in front of a reality that the world has never faced before.”
To that end:
If things were the way they were, we assuredly would be celebrating the return of athletes all over the world from Tokyo, and the Olympic Games. Instead, we look at the calendar and the International Olympic Committee’s assertion that the Games can and will — should — take place next July.
The obvious question is — how?
Given the statistics that show the virus on the rampage all over the world, it seems wishful thinking — at best — to imagine 11,000 athletes from 200-plus national Olympic countries descending on Tokyo in 11 short months.
A quick recap of some numbers: more than 800,000 people worldwide have died of the coronavirus, according to the Washington Post’s tracking, 173,000 in the United States. Globally, there have been more than 23 million cases. In California alone, more than 663,000.
The optimist says the NBA bubble experiment in Orlando seems to be successful. And what is an Olympics if not the ultimate bubble?
The pessimist says, just to raise a few of a million questions, who’s gonna pay for 11,000 athletes to quarantine for some number of days upon arrival? What about the coaches, NOC staff, journalists, broadcasters — who’s going to pay for them, and their quarantines? What about the Tokyo transport plan, which called for extensive use of the subway?
And on and on and on, going back to the Post’s list of current coronavirus hotspots: the United States, Brazil, India, Russia, South Africa, Peru, Mexico, Colombia, Chile, Spain, Iran, Argentina, Bangladesh, France, and many more. India deserves special mention; it reported, 61,408 infections in the last 24 hours, per a report Sunday from its federal health ministry, taking its total caseload past 3.1 million; it took just 17 days to go from 2 million to over 3.1 million.
How many more numbers, how many more nations do we need before, again, a return to the essential: the foundation for an Olympics is bringing the young people from everywhere in the world together and how, exactly, does that seem possible?
A vaccine? Do we even get to the moral, legal and ethical issues surrounding the issuance of any vaccine to the so-called Olympic family before literally billions of other human beings?
In an interview last week with BBC’s Radio 4 Today Program. World Athletics president Seb Coe said the following, and it makes you wonder what Coe knows, or suspects, because remember he was head of the London 2012 Games:
“I really hope we are in a position to deliver the Tokyo Games.
“We also may have to think slightly out of the box about how we [that is, World Athletics] might have to create other types of events if — I hope not — but if we have a very badly disrupted season generally.”
At this moment, it’s worth asking (and not for the first time) — since it is, after all, two-thirds of the way through 2020 — about the efficiency of Agenda 2020, the alleged reform plan dreamed up by IOC president Thomas Bach and signed off on by the IOC membership in late 2014 with an eye toward simplifying things and reducing costs.
Tokyo was elected in 2013 with promises of an all-in budget of $7.8 billion. Now that budget is officially $12.6 billion (close to double) but believed to be more like $25 billion (more than triple).
To be plain-spoken, the IOC is quite possibly looking at a consequential if not existential challenge.
Its main responsibilities are twofold: recruit cities to stage the Games and then, you know, stage the Games. By staging the Games it forcefully reminds young people around the world that the Olympics — and, critically, the values for which the movement stands — are relevant.
The IOC’s existential quest is to be relevant.
The point of this piece is not to argue that the red sun has set on the IOC, or for that matter, the Olympic Games or the Olympic movement. Far from it. The Olympic values — excellence, friendship, respect — are as relevant today, if not more so, than ever.
The challenge is re-thinking how to stand for, disseminate, convey the values that make the IOC different from every other sporting enterprise on Planet Earth.
The pandemic has made plain, for instance, that a three-day in-person IOC session can be done in four hours, and online. How many more instances of downsizing can — should — the IOC undertake? How many sports really should be on the program? 28 — why? 11,000 athletes — why? If the point of an Olympics is bringing the youth of the world together, why in 2024 hold surfing literally thousands of miles from Paris in Tahiti? Breakdancing is fun but let’s compare: a new study indicates that some 3 billion people — that’s three-eighths of the world — are playing esports.
And on and on.
That — a systemic look at those fundamental questions — would truly make for an Agenda 2020.
IOC president Thomas Bach in the photo that accompanied his April 29 “Olympism and Corona” white paper // IOC / Greg Martin
Bach deserves enormous credit for his April 29 white paper, entitled, “Olympism and Corona.” Bach, from the mold of his mentor, Juan Antonio Samaranch, IOC president from 1980-2001, understands politics, diplomacy, process and risk management. Among his primary challenges is to move an unwieldy bureaucracy. In this document, which somehow has escaped widespread scrutiny — incredible, really — he challenges the status quo, no easy thing for the leader of a global movement. Bach declares, straight up, “We will all need to take a close look at the scope of some of our activities and make the necessary adjustments to the new realities.”
This cannot mean cosmetic pronouncements of the sort purportedly set forth in Agenda 2020.
It has to mean, bluntly, systemic change.
Systemic change only — repeat, only — takes place in crisis.
This is why, for instance, the IOC was moved to 50 reforms amid the Salt Lake bid scandal 20 years ago.
The question on the table now is whether the IOC, a bastion of tradition, can and will — make that should — recognize that it is confronting this consequential if not existential moment. The past is gone. You want to talk disruption? We are in the midst of a moment in which lines are blurred — to our detriment, the virus has compressed traditional notions of time, distance and space but, simultaneously, considerably to our benefit, technology can often do the same.
If the IOC can’t put on the Tokyo Games, the odds of it pulling off the Beijing Winter Games, just six months later, would figure to be — what? Not good. But wouldn’t it serve the Chinese hosts to put the Beijing Games back a full year, to 2023, when — what’s this — it would mark the 10-year anniversary of Xi Jinping taking over as president of the People’s Republic of China? What, politics and sports intertwined? (Cue boycott howls now. For the record: boycotts only hurt athletes.)
Samaranch, who was a diplomat in Moscow before his Olympic years, understood politics and sports even as he danced around the topic for public consumption. He understood business, too. The Samaranch model of Olympic funding dates to 1984, sparked by Peter Ueberroth’s vision that broadcasting could underwrite the entire thing.
To be plain-spoken again, Juan Antonio Samaranch — may he rest in peace — has been dead for two IOC presidents now.
What will historians say about the inflection point of 2020, when we came to understand that this model was fit for time and place? What will Gen Z say? What will Generation Alpha think?
How many of today’s 16- to 24-year-olds watch TV? Aren’t they on Twitch? Stream? Their mobile phones?
The IOC’s existential quest is to be relevant.
It might be six years — from PyeongChang in 2018 until Paris in 2024 — without a Games. Six years in today’s 24/7/365 social-media environment might as well be 50. Call it five if it’s Beijing 2023, still a mighty long time and, let’s face it, the Winter Games are not Summer.
If you can’t stage an Olympiad, as the technical term for the Summer Games goes for the key franchise, how are you relevant?