While most major sporting events scheduled for the near future have been postponed, the Tokyo Olympics, scheduled to start on July 24, remains a notable exception. Swaroop Swaminathan looks at why the International Olympic Committee hasn’t yet postponed the event and the challenges the body faces in organising it as per schedule...
Asily Alekseyev (men’s weightlifting; +110kg) and Csaba Fenyvesi (men’s epee) were on top of the world after winning the two Olympic gold medals that were on offer on September 6, 1972. The celebrations, however, were muted as the 12th day of the Munich Games drew to a close.Some 30 hours previously, a Palestinian terrorist group, Black September, had raided the Olympic Village and took several members of the Israeli contingent hostage. In one of the Games’ most tragic days to date, all of them were killed within the next 20 hours.The next morning, Avery Brundage, the outgoing president of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), during a memorial service to honour the dead athletes, said: “The Games must go on.” It did go on.
For all the emphasis on Citius, Altius and Fortius, those five words have been the IOC’s underlying motto. The. Games. Must. Go. On.It has survived three mass boycotts (1976, 1980 and 1984 Summer Games), the Zika virus (2016 Summer Games), Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un threatening to nuke each other (2018 Winter Games) and 9/11 (2002 Winter Games).
There have been five previous instances of an Olympics being cancelled after a country had won the right to host. All five had to be binned because of the onset of World War I or World War II. Japan, curiously, had won the right to hold the 1940 Games but had to forfeit it. IOC then awarded it to Finland who also forfeited it as the world plunged deep into WWII.Eighty-one years later, Japan is once again the hosts and the Summer Games are 124 days away. Will the outbreak of COVID-19 force the IOC’s hands for only the sixth time in the 124-year history of the modern Olympics?
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It’s fair to say that Michael Payne has seen a few calls made by the media to postpone or cancel the Olympics. As former IOC marketing head, he has lived through a few of these ‘crises’. That’s why he maintains that the world body will not be ‘pressured into making a call just because the media demands it’. “It’s simple,” he says. “I will give you an example from two years ago. A couple of months before the PyeongChang Games, we had two world leaders threatening nuclear war. In the end, the Games went ahead and they were highly successful, to say the least.
“The IOC’s priority, at the moment, is ensuring the health and welfare of all the athletes. However, there is time...19 weeks is a long time and the IOC will not be guided because of external, political or media pressure.” The 62-year-old, widely credited for giving the Olympics movement an image makeover in the 1980s and 1990s, makes a compelling case for not going down the route of other sporting bodies in taking a decision now. “How would it look if the IOC said today: ‘look, I think we may have to postpone the Games by a couple of months’ and then a couple of months later, the world is back to normal? It would be bad.
“The Euros were supposed to begin on June 11. The Olympics isn’t due to start till July 24. So the IOC has more time on their hands,” Payne, who is in self-quarantine in Costa Brava, a coastal region in Catalonia, says.It’s a line that’s being maintained by the IOC itself. In a lengthy press release on Tuesday, the body said ‘there was no need for any drastic action’. “With more than four months to go before the Games there is no need for any drastic decisions at this stage, and any speculation at this moment would be counterproductive.”
However, a few IOC members have not agreed with that assessment. “Athletes can’t train. Attendees can’t plan travel. Sponsors and marketers can’t market with any degree of sensitivity. I think the IOC insisting this will move ahead, with such conviction, is insensitive and irresponsible given the state of humanity. We don’t know what’s happening in the next 24 hours, let alone in the next three months.” Those were the words of Hayley Wickenheiser, a four-time Olympic champion and a current IOC member, a few days ago.
There is similar mixed messaging coming out of Japan. One only needed to follow the words of Shinzo Abe, Japan’s Prime Minister. He had insisted that the Games would go ahead as planned till last week. Yet, after a G7 conference call on the coronavirus on Monday, he refused to put a date on it.
Curiously, Thomas Bach, the head of the IOC, has also subtly changed his stance over the last few days. In an interview with The New York Times on Thursday, the German, who insisted that it was ‘premature’ to postpone the Games, revealed that they were considering ‘different scenarios’. A significant departure from his earlier messages.
After Japan’s Olympic minister, Seiko Hashimoto, had raised the possibility of a postponement on March 3, the IOC Executive Board meeting, which met on March 4, had not even brought up two words ‘postponement’ and ‘cancellation’.In an unrelated development, the total number of confirmed positive SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes COVID-19) cases, as on March 4, stood at 95,314. In the wee hours of March 22? Over 2,90,000.
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Elite footballers have kept themselves entertained with cute workout videos. A few, like Lionel Messi, have taken part in #StayAtHomeChallenges. In a 17-second video on Instagram, the Argentine plays keepy-uppy with a packet of loo roll, flicks it on to his chest before playing with it again. After a bit, he strikes the roll like how he would finish off a flowing Barcelona move.At the same time, the world that’s inhabited by Olympians, especially in an Olympic year, is rather different. Their social media posts don’t have any #StayAtHomeChallenges. Even the ones who have been confined have had to come up with out of the box ideas to to ensure they are staying fit.
Take, for instance, Sandi Morris, who won silver in the women’s pole vault in 2016. The US athlete loaded training equipment in her car to go in search of facilities to train. Yet, a day later, she realised that all official facilities were closed. Not an ideal scenario for athletes before the test of their lives. “The most infuriating part of this whole thing is it feels like the IOC is going to do what they want, regardless of what the athletes think,” she tweeted. “Regardless of the fact that we can’t train (...) it feels like our only choice is no choice.”
Closer home, Indian athletes have not needed to hunt places to train. The ones not in quarantine and in national camps are still managing to put in the hard yards that are demanded of an Olympian. However, some of them would like some answers sooner rather than later. A Sharath Kamal, who is in a quasi-quarantine after coming back from Oman a week ago, has been going on some very-early morning runs to keep himself fit. However, his thoughts have wandered of late. “Sometimes, I have been asking myself, ‘why am I doing this?’ There is no clarity. I would like the IOC to take a call now,” he says.
“I acknowledge that there are bigger problems in the world. But, for me, my training has been disrupted. If this clears and the Olympics is going ahead, I will take time to peak, both physically and mentally as my periodisation has been affected.”
Those thoughts are echoed by shooter Abhishek Verma, who won one of India’s 15 shooting quotas. “There is some sort of non-motivation right now,” he says. “There is some confusion in the air.” Even though he admits that he is training like normal, assuming that the Olympics would go ahead as per plan, his tone betrays his thoughts.A few, though, have managed to carry on unmindful of the external noise because ‘we can only control the controllables.’ “Athletes don’t have control over it,” says Ravi Dahiya, a 57kg freestyle wrestler. “I am doing what I can at the moment. I am giving more than 100 per cent to stay in the best shape for the Olympics. The host country Japan looks confident at the moment. They are saying the Games will be held on time, so we have to believe them,” Dahiya, who earned a quota place, says.
Those thoughts are echoed by Sjoerd Marijne, the women’s chief hockey coach. “We can only control the controllables, the girls haven’t lost focus or anything. They are still training with the same intensity,” he says. They were one of India’s first sports teams to get affected — an exposure trip to China was scrapped in February — but the Dutchman reckons they will be fine. “We had a meeting where we discussed the situation (with respect to the virus)... we are going ahead with our preparations thinking the Olympics will begin on July 24 and that’s the kind of intensity I want.”
Will it, though? Dr Dean Winslow, an infectious disease specialist at Stanford Health Care, doesn’t want to speculate but believes that the world will, first and foremost, have to ‘flatten the curve’. Why does that matter? It indicates that fewer people are getting infected. At the moment, though, ‘it’s growing at an exponential rate’. “Like you have read, all the models indicate that there is still a couple of weeks to go before the virus peaks...”
However, Winslow sees why the IOC doesn’t want to take a call now. “If I were to say when they would have to take a call, they can, perhaps, wait till May. That would be my guess. At that stage, it would be pretty clear to say whether the rate of infections will decrease substantially by the time the Olympics come around.”
However, even the world of science isn’t exactly sure of the virus’ progress because “it’s still early days and these are forecasts... that’s a big caveat,” according to Winslow.One thing is abundantly clear. The voices of dissent are growing. More than a couple of bodies — including the Norweigian Olympic Committee, USA Swimming and World Athletics — have either urged the IOC to postpone the Games or have hinted that it could be postponed.
Heck, earlier this month, members of a WhatsApp group, containing some elite athletes of a popular Olympic sport, started bouncing some questions. “Why are they (IOC) not announcing anything,” was one question. “Other sporting bodies have postponed or cancelled their flagship events, what are the IOC waiting for,” was a second question. A third question followed. “Doesn’t the IOC value our lives?”
A fourth member of the group started composing an answer. “They stopped the NBA after few players tested positive. They did away with the Premier League after (Arsenal manager Mikel Arteta) Arteta found out he was positive. The Champions League was indefinitely postponed once Real Madrid was asked to go into quarantine. Maybe... maybe they will take that call if and when a prominent Olympian tests positive.”
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It’s perhaps wrong to compare COVID-19 to a World War or a terrorist act but this is, perhaps, the single biggest challenge most countries have had to face at the same time since WWII. Dozens of them are in some sort of lockdown, most flights have been grounded and people’s movements are heavily restricted as most nations take war-time measures to fight an invisible enemy that has already killed thousands and infected more than 290,000.
Four months and four days might seem a long time but for the Games to proceed as planned, the world will not only have to flatten the curve, it will also have to bring infections to zero. With no vaccine, an experimental drug cocktail that may or may not work on a case-to-case basis and against all forecasted scientific models, the race between the IOC and the SARS-CoV-2 is on.