TOKYO (AP) – Tokyo presented itself as a “safe pair of hands” when it hosted the Olympics 7 and a half years ago.
“Certainty was a crucial factor,” said Craig Reedie, IOC vice president at the time, after the 2013 vote in Buenos Aires.
Now, nothing is certain, as on Tuesday the postponed Olympic Games in Tokyo reached the 100-day mark to end. Despite growing cases of COVID-19, countless scandals and overwhelming public opposition in Japan to the Games, the organizers and the IOC are moving forward.
The 1964 Tokyo Olympics were held Japan’s rapid recovery from the defeat of World War II. These Olympics will be marked by footnotes and asterisks. Athletes will score a lot, of course, but the goals elsewhere will be modest: to achieve this, to avoid becoming a widespread event, and to provoke national pride knowing that few countries could have achieved this.
“The government is well aware of how the world sees Japan,” Dr. Gill Steel, who teaches political science at Doshisha University in Kyoto, wrote in an email. “The cancellation of the Olympics would have been seen, to some degree, as a public failure on the international stage.”
The price will be high when the Olympics open on July 23rd.
The official cost is $ 15.4 billion. Olympic spending is difficult to track, but several government audits suggest it may be double that, and all but $ 6.7 billion is public money.
The Swiss-based IOC generates 91% of its revenues from the sale of emission rights and sponsorship. That’s at least $ 5 billion in a four-year cycle, but the revenue stream from networks like U.S.-based NBC has been halted by the deferral.
What takes Tokyo out of the 17-day sports circus?
Fans from abroad are banned, tourism is out and there will be no space for the neighborhood party. Athletes are said to arrive late, leave early, and maneuver around a maze of moving rules.
There are also reputational costs for Japan and the International Olympic Committee: a bribery scandal, misplanning and repeated misogyny in Tokyo’s Olympic leadership.
The IOC is betting that Tokyo will be a distraction, “the light at the end of the pandemic tunnel,” as the closing ceremony comes just six months before the opening of the Beijing Winter Olympics, threatened by the boycott.
Several surveys suggest that up to 80% of Japanese want the Olympics to be canceled or postponed. And many scientists oppose it.
“It’s best not to hold the Olympics because of the considerable risks,” Dr. Norio Sugaya, an infectious disease expert at Yokohama’s Keiyu Hospital, told The Associated Press.
The launch of vaccines in Japan has been almost non-existent, few will get shots before the opening of the Olympics and Tokyo has raised its “alert level” with another wave predicted about the time of the opening ceremony. About 9,500 deaths in Japan have been attributed to COVID-19, good by global standards, but poor by standards in Asia.
And what is the impact of 15,400 Olympic and Paralympic athletes from more than 200 countries and territories entering Japan, joined by tens of thousands of officers, judges, media and broadcasters?
“The risks are high in Japan. Japan is dangerous, it is not a safe place at all, ”Sugaya said.
The heavily sponsored torch relay with 10,000 runners crossing Japan also presents dangers. Legs scheduled for Osaka this week were removed from the streets due to growing cases of COVID-19 and moved to a city park, with no fans allowed. Surely other legs from all over Japan will be altered.
The IOC and Japanese politicians decided a year ago to postpone but not cancel the Olympics, driven by the inertia and influence of Japanese giant Dentsu Inc., which has secured $ 3.5 billion in local sponsorship, probably three times more than any previous Olympics.
“I think the government knows full well that the Japanese public doesn’t want the Olympics right now,” Dr. Aki Tonami, who teaches political science at Tsukuba University, wrote in an email to AP. “But no one wants to be the one to pull the plug.”
The Olympics may also determine the fate of Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga, who replaced Shinzo Abe seven months ago. It was Abe who told IOC voters in 2013 that the March 11, 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster was “under control”.
Despite being considered the “Recovery Olympics,” the northeastern part of Japan continues to suffer a decade later. Many blame the Olympics for the slow recovery and absorption of resources.
“Suga’s fate is sealed,” Tonami said. “I think he knows his term as prime minister won’t be long, so while it would be good for him to go ahead, he probably won’t change the political conditions around him.”
Steel was more optimistic.
“Their government is more likely to survive, even thrive, if they manage to get a successful Olympics, a risky strategy, obviously, if it’s a disaster.”
IOC President Thomas Bach has repeatedly called Tokyo the “best-prepared Olympic Games in history” and reiterated it during the pandemic. Handsome venues grew rapidly, including the $ 1.4 billion Kengo Kuma National Stadium, and while expensive, the Games followed the right path to the success of the pandemic.
But the “safe pair of hands” has often been unstable.
Tokyo’s initial logo was dismantled after it was declared plagiarized, the original concept of the stadium was removed when costs exceeded $ 2 billion and the chairman of the organizing committee, Yoshiro Mori, a former prime minister , stopped two months ago after making derogatory comments about women. Artistic director Hiroshi Sasaki left a few weeks later, essentially for the same reason.
In addition, French prosecutors believe Tokyo landed the Olympics by channeling bribes to IOC voters. Apparently, Rio de Janeiro landed the 2016 Olympics in the same way, prosecutors allege.
Tsunekazu Takeda, IOC member then head of the Japanese Olympic Committee, he was forced to resign two years ago over the vote-buying scandal. He denied any wrongdoing.
Dr. Lisa Kihl, who studies sports governance and is the director of the World Institute for Responsible Sports Organizations at the University of Minnesota, said corruption has been “institutionalized” in many sports governing bodies, especially those that they operate across national borders.
“It’s so easy to make money with the system,” he said in an interview with the AP. “No one will shake the boat because everyone benefits from it. Professional sports organizations in a country (specifically the United States) must comply with the rules of that country. At the international level, there is no body that demands responsibility from organizations such as the IOC. Until international sports are governed like financial institutions, it will not change. “
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