Not a level playing field in Olympics
Last week, the local organising committee for the upcoming Tokyo Olympics issued more stringent rules for athletes coming from 11 nations, including India. The why is simple. The Delta variant, first identified in India, is seemingly more transmissible. Its rapid rise is causing a jump in coronavirus cases in some countries and the organising committee wants to take no chances.
But this decision comes with the Olympics barely a month away and will affect athletes’ training. These rules—one of them states that competitors from India will have to maintain physical distancing for three days (a euphemism for quarantine) upon landing there—bring with it the fear that athletes may lose out on precious training time with just days to go for the Games. One can argue that they aren’t going to learn anything new about themselves this close to the competition but that’s not how these things work. There is something called continuity of training and anything that doesn’t allow it is disrupting the cycle. Another issue is mandatory testing of all those travelling from India every day for seven days prior to departure and that too from specific laboratories. Indian authorities believe this could expose the athletes to the virus.
All athletes constantly keep working in training and are fine-tuning their techniques in search of that 1% more. And in the Olympics, nothing can be left to chance. Will not this restriction give an unfair advantage to athletes from other countries? Something contrary to what the International Olympic Committee (IOC) promotes—a level playing field.
That’s even before getting into the argument about the supply and distribution of food and dietary supplements. These two questions have already been asked by the Indian Olympic Association (IOA), which is miffed with the additional rules. The IOA has also been forced to take a relook at the whole logistics of sending Olympics-bound athletes from India and their departures are being rescheduled. Even if the IOA wants the IOC to relax these new rules (the external affairs ministry too is involved and is trying to smooth the issues for the athletes), that’s not likely to happen, as of now. They have likely been put in place to build some confidence in the eyes of the Japanese public. In that case, the IOC could have tried to level the playing field by extending the same advisory to athletes from all countries as the current rules appear to be discriminatory.