Happy New Year, welcome 2021, and here we are, exactly 200 days until the purported start of the Tokyo Summer Games.
The optimist says — let’s go!
The realist says — are you kidding?
The centerpiece of all journalism, the core of all story-telling, is tension. You want tension?
Social distancing? Street scene Monday in Tokyo’s Harajuku area as Japan mulls plans to declare another state of emergency in the capital and three neighboring prefectures, possibly for a month // Kyodo News via Getty Images
On the one hand, you’ve got billions of dollars, $16 billion officially, perhaps roughly $30 billion unofficially, already laid out in preparation for the Tokyo Games. You know what they say. Money talks, BS walks. Those sorts of billions make for a lot of talking, no matter the dialect.
In the other corner, we have the virus. Here is just one headline from Monday’s New York Times: ‘The virus is still winning.’ Indeed, the new B.1.1.7 variant, as the Times explains, appears to be between 10 and 60 percent more transmissible than the original version.
So there you have it, in short order. Money versus virus.
Well, to be fair, there’s one other element. As International Olympic Committee president Thomas Bach has said, time and again, and he is 100 percent right in expressing commitment once more in his New Year’s Day 2021 address to this theme in a bid to get Tokyo 2020 to happen, “These Olympic Games will be the light at the end of the tunnel. They will be a celebration of solidarity, of unity, of humankind in all our diversity and of resilience.”
Thomas Bach in the photo accompanying his New Year’s Day remarks // IOC
To be clear: the Tokyo Games would be my 11th edition of the Olympics, Summer or Winter. For personal and professional reasons, this space would love to see them happen. It would be an incredible privilege to report from Tokyo on what is likely to be one of the most unique expressions of the Olympic movement in our, or anyone’s, lifetimes.
For more than 20 years, in all my reporting about the movement, I have been driven by the passionate belief, forged as a boy watching the 1972 Games on a black-and-white TV at home in rural Ohio, that the Olympics affords a — if not the — best chance for humankind to learn from and with each other. Meaning: we are all way more alike than we are different, and in that simple truth lies our very best chance to help repair our fragile and broken planet and make it better, so that our children and theirs can learn from our mistakes and go forward with a greater sense of empathy and compassion for one another. We are all, each of us, in this together.
The problem for Tokyo 2020 in July of 2021 is that — no matter the best efforts of humankind, no matter how much money, even — the virus is still winning.
Last year, the IOC postponed the 2020 Games until 2021 on March 24. It took that action 13 days after Rudy Gobert of the Utah Jazz tested positive for COVID-19, the tipping point that led to the suspension of the NBA season. Shortly after, the NHL, Major League Baseball and MLS would suspend play as well.
The IOC action came after days of intense pressure. It had no choice but to postpone.
The issue now, in this first week of 2021, is when the spotlight will pivot back onto the IOC. And whether, once more, it will have no choice but to consider summer 2022, even though Bach has said another “postponement” would mean “cancellation.” The Winter Games in Beijing are due to get underway in February 2022.
But $30 billion — or even $16 billion — doesn’t really allow for a cancellation, does it? Nor does geopolitical (especially regional) prestige, Is Japan going to sit idly by if China pulls off an Olympics?
What about — back to the Olympic movement itself — the fate of the many international sports federations, many of whom are in financial dire straits. They literally cannot afford a cancellation. And so on down the line — consider the national governing bodies in this country and other nations, all of whom depend desperately on the money they get from an Olympics.
Not to mention the existential issue facing the IOC: if the Games don’t happen in a 24/7/365 always-on world where teens and 20-somethings have, in this pandemic, turned with astonishing speed to esports and other video alternatives, how do the Olympics stay relevant?
Straight up, the virus is winning.
Japan last week further closed its borders, barring most foreign nationals, in a bid to curb the spread of the virus. Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga said Monday he is considering declaring a state of emergency in Tokyo and other areas; numbers for COVID-19 case levels, though small in comparison to the United States, are surging; Tokyo accounts for half of Japan’s cases.
Elsewhere?
UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson on Monday announced a new lockdown, including the closure of schools. It is expected to remain in place through the middle of February.
The vaccine(s)?
Here in Los Angeles, Mayor Eric Garcetti said Sunday that state and local governments didn’t get what they were promised: “We are at a pace right now to deliver vaccines in Los Angeles in over five years instead of over half a year at this pace.”
Meanwhile, Los Angeles County Public Health Director Barbara Ferrer reported Monday that the current “positivity” rate is 21 percent. In plain English: one in five people tested in Los Angeles County is positive. That’s so high that, she said, you “run the risk of transmission whenever you leave your home.”
These sorts of data points can go on and on and on … and on.
At some point, the issue for Bach and the IOC becomes not whether Tokyo can be done — it can — but whether enough numbers of people around the world believe it can be done, or should, or want to take the leap of faith that going to Tokyo will be safe, however one defines “safe.”
The data points aren’t just overwhelming. They have the potential for vast alarm. For tremendous fear.
Worldwide.
So — story-telling tension — what’s at issue, in sum, is a confidence game. Will there be enough confidence in Tokyo 202/1?
The deadline that’s coming up will probably be looming in, again, March.
Here, the IOC president and other decision-makers are going to confront the sentiments perhaps best expressed by the greatest Olympic athlete of our, or anyone’s, time — Michael Phelps.
In an interview with CNN last month, Phelps said:
“The fact that you’re going to put 10,000-plus athletes, plus all the volunteers, plus all the coaches, it doesn’t make sense to me. I just don’t see how it can happen.
“But, fingers crossed, that everything with vaccines and everything goes smoothly on that front. But, I mean, I don’t know, there’s just too much unknown.”
Blunt truth: human beings, no matter where or when, do not like uncertainty. We do not like the unknown.
This is the crux of it. You have the light of the world stuff, which is all to the good, and for real, because it expresses the confidence the IOC must express. It must. And then there are the billions of dollars. Which speak with considerable volume. But then: “… there’s just too much unknown.”
Which, unless something changes dramatically between now and the end of March 2021, seemingly leaves the IOC in exactly the same place it was in on March 24, 2020.
Because the virus is winning. Still.