OPINION

Tokyo 2020: is it going to be worth it?

The rescheduled Summer Olympics, delayed from 2020, were intended to be held in a world that had brought the pandemic under control. When they were postponed, there was an optimism that Tokyo 2020 would go ahead in some kind of relative ‘normality’. Of course, that’s not the case. The western world is a shifting mess of lockdowns, vaccination programmes, third, fourth and fifth waves of variant viruses, quarantine procedures, strained public health systems, torpid economies and all the rest that COVID-19 has dragged along with it.

The Olympics ultimately relies on certainty; it works only because it doesn’t move on the calendar. You can’t delay it for a couple of days while you fix a few things. It’s a performance of logistics on a titanic scale. If one aspect of it is not on track, the only solution is to throw immense amounts of resources at it until it is. Many aspects of Rio 2016, not helped by major budget problems and a general Brazilian disposition to do things at the last minute, were barely finished in time. The 2016 Paralympics almost didn’t take place at all.

Few people have the conception of just how big and complicated putting on a Games is, and how it becomes a simple choice of ‘go’ or ‘no go’, and that choice has essentially long been made. This inflexibility has butted up hard against the world of the past 18 months, where events large and small have been cancelled, postponed, postponed again, or readapted for an online world, often at very short notice. The Japanese public are understandably furious that the rest of the western world gets to choose what is allowed under public health guidelines and to follow the path of the pandemic, when they are stuck with something far too big to just cancel.