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074 TOKYO


WILL THEY? Won’t they? Will the Olympics take place this year? If so, will anyone go? Does anyone care?


After the year when everything changed, the pandemic a turning point in world history, a once-in-a-century event, and amid the on-off gradual-occasional return to the office, Zoom fatigue and a jolt of panic over slumping sales forecasts to make many itch to hit the road again, the sheer slowbalisation of everything demands other questions. Where is the finishing line? Does Covid-19 mean the end of sport as we know it? When did it all become real? Was it when we began to think of going to a sporting event – or even just a sports bar – as a threat rather than a relief from normal life? One day it will all be over. And yet, and yet. As the industrial complex of global sport ground to a halt last year, it was only natural to feel shocked, concussed, even bereft. Tis has been the most seismic disruption to the sporting calendar since the Second World War, and while sport is prone to wildly overstating its importance at the best of times, interpreting all global events through its own prism, the Olympics really are different. Block-booked


seven years in advance, this is a multibillion- dollar, made-for-television extravaganza that serves as an investment vehicle for scores of sponsors and media partners, and as a source of entertainment for millions.


While many athletes are currently unable to train or practice properly, at the last count, over 11,000 competitors from 200 countries are expected. Te debate over allowing spectators at all in the current situation is one of the fiercest. Te idea of staging the Olympics with just participants and no spectators – effectively making it just a global television event – would not solve the central problem of how many people are required simply to run the Games. Over 80,000 workers, support staff and volunteers are getting ready – and then there is the media. US network NBC alone originally planned to take 2,000 people to Japan. Te Olympic spectacle is a powerful drug, but viewed from where we are right now, it could become a dystopic Covid hot zone. You bring a lot of people together, and then you ship them back all over the world: that’s the perfect way to transmit a disease.


Te financial and logistical implications are enormous. Te Olympic flame is still flickering, but only just. Te numbers are all mind- boggling. Scheduled to run from 23 July to 8 August, with the Paralympics set to begin on 24 August, there are around 7.8 million tickets to sell. Originally budgeted at half the cost of London 2012, the costs have now doubled, with the total projected costs expected to double again: from $7.3bn to $15bn to nearer $30bn. Some of the hoopla surrounding all this is bound to be cut, but it will not save much money.


Do those sums matter? You may well ask. Japan had budgeted to borrow $1.3trn this year. To adapt the US Republican senator Everett Dirksen’s old line, ‘A trillion here, a trillion there, and pretty soon we’re talking real


money.’ Japan is already the most indebted country in the world at 250% of its GDP. With a continued high degree of uncertainty about the global economic outlook, why would it worry about the cost? Wherever that number ends up, the cost of staging the Olympics is a rounding error. With the next global sporting event – the Winter Olympics – due to be held in China in 2022, Asian rivalry will mean that a few billion extra is a small price to pay for not having spectacularly failed before passing the baton to Beijing.


It could still be called off again. If the pandemic is still raging, if infections rise in Japan, or if there is a loss of support in the country – those are just three reasons why the Games may not happen. Te last of these is the most likely to call a halt to the event. (As deaths from Covid-19 in the UK head for 150,000 with 4 million people already testing positive, the figures for Japan, a country with twice the UK’s population, are comparatively low: just over 7,000 deaths and 350,000 cases.) In January, Sir Keith Mills, deputy chair of the organising committee for London 2012, predicted to BBC


ALL IMAGES: COURTESY OF TOKYO 2020


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