The key purpose of the Olympic movement is not to make money. It is “to place sport at the service of the harmonious development of humankind.”
Thomas Bach, president of the International Olympic Committee, has many times said the Tokyo Olympics can — should — serve as a “beacon of hope to the world during these troubled times.”
This week, the IOC is due to reveal what it is calling the Playbook, the layers of protocols and policies it has for months been developing in a bid to pull off the Tokyo Games, Olympic and Paralympic, amid the global coronavirus pandemic. The Olympics are due to open July 23. The Paralympics are scheduled to open Aug. 24.
The Playbook, the IOC has made clear, is about trying to create safe bubbles in Tokyo. It will be revised — and revised again — as July 23 draws near.
The Playbook is essential. But there needs to be more.
IOC president Thomas Bach touring National Stadium in Tokyo last November // Getty Images
The Olympics bring together the world. Consider: there are 8 billion people, more or less, in our broken and fragile world. As the New York Times reported Monday, more than 90 million have received a coronavirus vaccine outside of clinical trials — but, in all of sub-Saharan Africa, home to about 1 billion people, only 25 people have gotten the vaccine. For emphasis: 25, total.
The previous column in this space said that the world needs Bach to show the world more than leadership. It needs his humanity. He needs to be the humanitarian — the personable executive he can be behind closed doors — that the leadership of this moment calls for.
Here is how.
The Olympic Games is the most complex peacetime event on Planet Earth.
The IOC — with its partners, the organizing committees — often proves itself a master of planning and logistics. (See, for instance: Playbook.)
To be candid: the best operations teams in the world run the Olympic Games.
That 25 people total, in a region of 1 billion, have been vaccinated is — an outrage.
Those numbers have, as the Times reported, set the stage for a “catastrophic moral failure,” in the words of Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, head of the World Health Organization. Further, in our interconnected world, because variants of the virus know no passports, it is in everyone’s interest -- developing world and developed — to act.
“This idea that no one is safe until everyone is safe is not just an adage,” Andrea Taylor, assistant director at Duke Global Health Innovation Center told the Times. “It is really true.”
Time is ticking.
Experts have warned that the pandemic almost surely will have significant mental health consequences. In Japan, government statistics show more people killed themselves in October 2020 — 2,153 suicides — than had died from January through November of last year because of the coronavirus, 2,087.
The numbers are all the more notable because the country was not then under lockdown; it is now. Moreover, the figures reversed a trend that had seen Japan’s suicide rate fall to a 40-year low in 2019. And — the primary source of the increase of the suicides was women. The number of women killing themselves was about 70 percent higher in October 2020 compared with the prior three Octobers.
Enter the IOC.
The purpose of the Olympic movement is to put sport at the service of humankind. In that spirit, Bach ought to call together the world’s best and brightest, who, as it happens, love the Olympics. Please consider these names suggestions and hardly inclusive:
— Bill Gates, the former Microsoft boss turned philanthropist
— Apple’s Tim Cook
— Helen Clark, the former UNDP administrator who, before that, served as New Zealand prime minister. See this, in which she laments the lack of a coordinated global response to the crisis.)
— Oprah Winfrey
— Jeff Bezos at Amazon
— Jack Ma in China
— Christine Lagarde, now president of the European Central Bank, former managing director of the International Monetary Fund
— Jacinda Ardern, current prime minister of New Zealand (everything she touches seemingly turns not only to gold but platinum)
— Her Royal Highness the Princess Royal (that is, Princess Anne of Great Britain who is, in every regard, a let’s-get-things-done woman)
— every single TOP partner (that is, the IOC top-tier group of sponsors)
— Johnson & Johnson (a former TOP partner)
— the WHO
— the UN
— every current organizing committee (Tokyo, Beijing, Paris, MIlano/Cortina, Los Angeles)
Now: who should be in charge of this supergroup?
Mitt Romney, the Utah senator and former U.S. Republican presidential candidate who ran the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympics.
Once more, the Tokyo Games get underway in July. Seemingly forgotten by many if not most but not the IOC: just a few months later, next February, the Beijing Winter Games are scheduled to start.
The playbook for this group — that timeline — ought to be that one-two focus. Inspired by the Olympic spirit, the best of all of us, it needs to be on finding the massive funding and securing the complex logistics for what needs to be done.
Which is, to be clear, by the start of the Winter Olympics in China: inoculate the world.
Every single person in our world deserves nothing less — deserves human dignity.
Go.