Why The Tokyo Olympic Organizers Have Not Cancelled Or Moved The Olympics, And What Will Happen When They Do

That the International Olympic Committee and the Tokyo organizers are holding firm is beyond doubt. In Olympos, Greece, on March 12, they staged a fine ceremony with actors and dancers in ancient costume on March 12 to light the torch, which was taken in the classic relay to the airport, where the flame was, according to Olympic protocol, flown to Japan. In Japan, beginning on March 20, the flame will be carried through a scaled-back version of its four-month foot-relay through the prefectures. The people of Japan will, still, be able to see the torch pass “from the road.” No less a figure than Toshiro Muto (pictured), the chair of the Tokyo Games, gave a press conference on March 17 stating as much.

After weeks of hard maintenance of the position that the games would be neither postponed nor cancelled, this was the first tiny Olympic blink, so to speak, as the Games move inexorably face-to-face with the pandemic. It wasn’t a huge concession. The Games, we are told, will go on. Unfortunately for the Japanese, and for all of us, so will the pandemic.

The intractable problem is that the four months Japan has until the Games supposedly open on July 24 is not necessarily the lifespan of a pandemic, and those short months certainly don’t seem in any way enough for this pandemic caused by SARS-CoV-2 to play out. We’re a year out, or possibly just under that, if we’re lucky, for a vaccine. Great swaths of Earth are just now at the beginning of their part of the battle, Eastern Europe, southwest Asia, and Africa chief among them.

The effect of the pandemic on global sport has been nothing short of catastrophic, but on the other hand, the response within athletics has been alert and caring: The Kentucky Derby has now been moved from May 2 to September 5, and is just the latest major sporting event to be cancelled or postponed. The Derby follows the cancellation of March Madness, the next three Formula One races, the rescheduling of the Masters, the cancellation of Major League Baseball’s spring training, the emptying of all soccer stadia in Europe, and the cancellation of the Euro 2020 soccer tournament. With more, of course, on the way. The point, with all due respect to the Japanese organizers and Japan as a country, is that moving large athletic events of the way of the onslaught of SARS-CoV-2 is being smartly and reasonably done.

Understandably, there’s a growing chorus questioning the doggedness of the Japanese in the matter of putting the Games on as scheduled. The epidemiological reasons are obvious: pernicious and hardy enough to rebuff treatment, SARS-CoV-2 is agile, jumping continent-to-continent at speed. It hasn’t hit every continent simultaneously, and its lifespan in the world’s kaleidoscopic collection of cultures is by no means uniform.

The tactics for the fight are well known: In order to reserve hospital and medical infrastructure, not to mention the global supply of medical professionals, the basic defensive tactic behind the many iterations of legislated lockdown and social distancing — for instance, EU chair Ursula von der Leyen’s March 17 proposal to lock down the Schengen zone for the next month — is to prolong the virus’ onset in each country so that there is a milder caseload during the inevitable spike, whenever that occurs. In graphic terms, the goal is to flatten the spike in the rate of infection.

Unfortunately for the Tokyo organizers of the Games, that does not mean that the duration of the pandemic in this or that country will be shorter. Put differently, the direction in which countries are striving to push their version of the spike in the caseload — however steep or mild that spike may be — is toward July 24.

That, in turn, means that the 209 nations contributing the 11,000-plus athletes to the Games will not be finished with the onslaught of Covid-19 at the same moment. In Europe, the virus’ march is from south (Italy) to north, and from west to east, from France to Germany and on to Poland and Eastern Europe. Italy’s hospital infrastructure has cracked under that country’s spike in infections. Italy is the poster child whose fate is driving much of the current, urgent, social distancing being legislated in Europe.

The timing — of each country’s viral endgame — will be crucial in determining who, if anybody, is able to show up for the Games. Tokyo is a long haul for some teams. It is not as if teams show up on the night of July 23, get some sleep, take some melatonin, and show up for competition the next day. Most teams like a runup of at least a couple of weeks for their athletes in the time zone and in the atmosphere of the Games, which is to say, early July, or three-and-a-half months from the Games.

Just keeping to a few of the notable teams coming from the European continent for the moment: If by some miraculous cocktail of timing and luck Japan is able to pull off a July 24 start, Italy’s ability to assemble and field its Olympic team — at all — will be sorely tested. Germany’s playing for time isn’t working out for the moment, the spike is severe, and happening now, this week, with cases doubling every couple of days. But with their superior health care system and supply chain, the Germans stand a chance of braking SARS-CoV-2 in a few weeks. Boris Johnson’s rather helter-skelter approach for the UK to date has changed in the last 72 hours, but it still puts Great Britain behind in the game. The UK’s spike is imminent. But whether any nation’s strategy through the economic and social morass created by the virus works, or not, the operative words here are all based on the concept of later.

Shortly after his own sudden about face in favor of a more aggressive SARS-CoV-2 strategy, President Trump floated a — for him, mild-mannered — notion that it would be a good idea if the Olympics were postponed. This triggered a ferocious rebuttal from Japanese Prime Minister Abe that that neither a postponement, nor a cancellation, would happen, period. The velocity and sharpness of Abe’s response gives us a glimpse of some of the other forces powering the Olympic greenlight.

The forces keeping the Olympics afloat are financial. Japan’s private sector will have invested some 10 trillion yen in putting on the Games when all is said and done, or $9.2 billion. The cost of the Olympic construction alone sits at $5.9 billion, or better. The national Olympic committees who vie for the Games and the organizing committees who prepare and stage them are corporate entities, with billions in global and local sponsorship deals. Over a million Japanese will be employed. It’s been estimated that the long-term profits from these investments in venues and infrastructure will be in the astronomical neighborhood of §225 billion. Not many people in Japan, very much including its sitting prime minister, wants to stop that maglev bullet train.

In short, the Olympics is a global modern sports business, with all that that implies, including television and film rights, not to mention streaming, publications, the rights to logo and trademark use, and the prestige of being named as a “Tokyo 2020 Gold Partner,” the highest of the three tiers of sponsorship available in Japan.

Why The Tokyo Olympic Organizers Have Not Cancelled The Olympics, And What Will Happen When They Do