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“The Tokyo Olympics Opening Ceremony will take place at 8 p.m. local time in Japan on Friday, July 23.” NBC Sports
Many on both sides criticize the Japanese government and the IOC, and wonder whether the games should have been delayed or canceled:
“The Tokyo Olympic fiasco didn’t start with the coronavirus pandemic. When Tokyo was elevated from candidate city to host, the two bid architects, Japan Olympic Committee President Tsunekazu Takeda and Masato Mizuno, chairman of the global Mizuno Sports Equipment Co., were jettisoned for political reasons. Their replacements, politicians Yoshiro Mori and Toshiro Muto, were neither sportsmen nor businessmen. So when the pandemic forced a one-year postponement of Tokyo 2020, there was no one capable of gathering the reins and salvaging the Olympics…
“While Israel was buying up enough vaccines to return to normalcy, Tokyo 2020, in step with the International Olympic Committee and fighting to preserve its brand, was instead concocting a series of ‘Playbooks’ whose goal was to protect unvaccinated Japanese from foreign Olympic participants, most of whom would be vaccinated… An official at the Japanese Embassy in Washington summed up the entire control effort up in 10 words: ‘Lack of information. Lack of instructions. Confusing information. Confusing instructions.’”
Jonathan Kolatch, Wall Street Journal
“Tokyoites regarded the idea of hosting with skepticism from the very beginning… In the lead-up to the Olympic selection, the approval rating for the idea of hosting the Games in Tokyo was the lowest of any of the candidate cities—in 2012, at the climax of the government’s efforts to secure the rights to the 2020 Games, just forty-seven per cent of those polled in Japan said that they wanted them, as compared with seventy-eight per cent public support in the rival city of Madrid…
“The irony is that, when the opening ceremony commences, on Friday, the Games will become a collective nightmare. Tokyo is currently recording covid-19 cases at alarmingly high levels; Wednesday’s eighteen hundred and thirty-two cases represent a number not seen since January, before the introduction of vaccines to the country. While these Olympics might well go down as the least wanted in history, they will have succeeded in bringing a nation together, just not quite in the way that their organizers envisioned. The spectre of infection links the citizens of Tokyo in a far more intimate way than the people of any host city before: boosters and critics, participants and avoiders alike, watching, waiting, and hoping for the best.”
Matt Alt, New Yorker
“In some ways, this reminds me of the Zika outbreak in Brazil during the 2016 Olympics, with one key distinction. Zika is a mosquito-borne virus which doesn’t spread through direct human contact. Eliminate the mosquitoes and you eliminate the transmission risk, and that strategy appeared to work five years ago. With COVID-19, and especially with the now-dominant Delta variant, the virus transmits rapidly through dense human populations…
“All of this raises a question: why not just wait until next year to hold the Olympics? It got postponed last year in the first wave of the pandemic when the dominant virus was the original SARS-Co-19 variant rather than the more transmissible Delta variant. By next year, we can expect much better vaccination levels worldwide and especially in Japan. If the Olympiad could survive a delay, why not delay it until better preparation could prevent the kind of issues these games have already seen — before the games even begin?”
Ed Morrissey, Hot Air
“You have to feel badly for Japan. Last year the Olympics were cancelled due to the pandemic leaving Japan in the unenviable position of host without a party. Determined to hold onto its role, the Japanese government put together intense health and safety protocols, including a testing and quarantining regimen, social distancing, solo living quarters and other measures that turned the Olympic Village into a sealed container…
“The result has been disappointing for athletes and has created global scrutiny over what could end up being a super spreader event. The International Olympic Committee has pressed forward, dispatching its chairman to Hiroshima for the obligatory announcement of peace. But his visit was met with protests. That should be a warning sign. So maybe it is time to call it quits. Truth be told, the reason the Games should never have gone forward is that the citizens of the host nation doesn't want them. Over 80 percent of Japanese citizens want the games cancelled. Olympic competition is a way for a nation to express pride in hosting international games. If the nation does not want it, there is little reason to hold it.”
Tara D. Sonenshine, The Hill
Other opinions below.
“Japan is restricting who can and cannot travel to the Summer Olympics this year. This is understandable because there is a pandemic that has killed millions of people. What is not understandable? Its anti-family restrictions. When athletes head to Japan, they generally cannot bring their children and child care providers. That’s the case even if there is proof that these people don’t have COVID-19…
“The IOC and Japan would rather subject babies to stress from being separated from their mothers and create a less positive environment for the athletes competing. These athletes love their children and want to spend time with them. And if there is someone who can help take care of the child, be it a spouse or a child care provider, why not let them come as well, provided that he or she doesn’t have the virus? Japan and the IOC could even require that such a person is fully vaccinated before he or she comes over.”
Tom Joyce, Washington Examiner
“With both the summer and winter Olympic Games set to take place during the coming year, athletes should not be allowed to protest the stars and stripes while wearing the stars and stripes…
“During a U.S.-China summit in Anchorage earlier this year, the head of the Chinese delegation, Yang Jiechi, laid out the Communist Party line: The Black Lives Matter movement shows that ‘the challenges facing the United States in human rights are deep-seated’ and that ‘many people within the United States actually have little confidence in the democracy of the United States.’ Therefore, Yang said, ‘it is important for the United States to change its own image and to stop advancing its own democracy in the rest of the world.’…
“If U.S. athletes protest the national anthem in Beijing, they will be echoing this Chinese Communist propaganda. Instead, maybe they should focus their protests on China’s systematic rape and forced sterilization of Uyghur women. Or perhaps they could call out their own corporate sponsors, such as Nike, which has been credibly implicated in the use of Uyghur forced labor and has lobbied Congress to water down the bipartisan Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, which would ban imported goods made with forced labor in China’s Xinjiang region. Unlike woke anthem protests, that would be an act of real courage.”
Marc A. Thiessen, Washington Post
“Cohorts of public-health experts, at least 6,000 primary-care doctors, and about 83 percent of the Japanese public would love for organizers to call the whole thing off. Yet the Olympics reportedly cost Japan $25 billion, while the IOC itself has billions tied up in broadcast deals; ‘there’s a real cast-iron will to deliver these Games,’ as World Athletics president Sebastian Coe put it in December. That unflinching resolve makes organizers’ priorities clear: Dollars before people, global implications be damned…
“And maybe I shouldn’t be surprised by that position given the toll the Olympics often take on their host city: In Atlanta, Beijing, and Rio de Janeiro, the Games have displaced tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of people — most of them poor, most of them by force — in favor of flashy construction projects. Right now, the IOC is ignoring international concerns about China’s suspected detention of Muslim Uighur out of preference for another contract with Beijing. The human cost of Olympic pageantry has never seemed to hold all that much weight with the organizers.”
Claire Lampen, The Cut
“Bad vibes are more or less the norm in the lead-up to the Olympics. Six weeks before the Athens Games in 2004, the New York Times reported that the main facilities were ‘still construction sites,’ and raised fears of a terrorist attack. In the runup to the 2008 Olympics, the coverage was heavily focused on human rights protests, construction worker deaths, and air pollution. The London games in 2012 overcame construction delays, security scares, and public opposition. Before the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, smart-ass American journalists snarked about the decision to hold the games in a ‘subtropical gangster’s paradise.’…
“In all these cases, the issues didn’t go away but the bad press dissipated pretty quickly once the sprinters were off the block or the skiers were out of the starting gate… There have been genuine atrocities during the games that really did overshadow the events, but they’ve been rare. The IOC and broadcasters like NBC are masters of spectacle who [are] very good at making it so you don’t have to think about these things while you’re watching. Perhaps this time is different, and they’ve really bitten off more than they can chew with the COVID Olympics. But I wouldn’t bet against them.”
Joshua Keating, Slate
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