This week, Tokyo Olympics took another step toward actually happening when the International Olympic Committee arranged to provide enough vaccine doses for every member of every national Olympic committee’s team.
The program will make it safer for athletes and staff to take part this summer, addressing the largest issue that stands in the way of Tokyo hosting the Olympics while a pandemic rages through the city. The one and only reason the Olympics were postponed 15 months ago was a threatened boycott by U.S. sports federations over safety concerns.
Without U.S. swimming and athletics, the TV money that forces the Olympics to take place in the summer months when Tokyo becomes a sauna, the IOC had no choice put to demand a postponement while allowing then prime minister Shinzo Abe to announce it was his idea — for the sake of the world.
But left to its own devices, Japan would not give away a summer Olympics the way it had the Tokyo 1940 games. Japan abandoned that project in 1949 because it was busy fighting a war on and establishing puppet states on the Asian continent. The government felt the resources spent promoting Olympic ideals would be better used subjugating eastern China and Manchuria.
But the money spent on the 2020 Olympics is already gone, and the graft already distributed. There is nothing left to hold them, and there is no question that regardless of how many bodies might have piled up in the streets of Tokyo last summer, Japan would have gone forward with the Olympics had the IOC not backed out.
We know that, because that is what we are seeing now with a vaccination effort a cynic might say is designed to allow Japan to have its Olympics whether its people want it or not, or whether its people survive it or not.
By promising to vaccinate everyone whose health might be put at risk through competing in Tokyo, the IOC hopes to prevent another potential boycott in a country, which is currently deemed to unsafe for IOC president Thomas Bach to visit as planned this month, can press forward.
The IOC has suggested the vaccination of Olympic athletes and coaches should not run counter to local government policy, but that is just eye-wash. Japan’s policy is to only vaccinate Olympians if it doesn’t interfere with vaccinating front-line health workers and the elderly.
Japan is behind schedule now and is not planning to vaccinate all its residents over 65 until the end of July — after the Olympics open. The doses it expects — enough to vaccinate roughly 2,500 Olympic and Paralympic athletes and coaches will arrive this month.
Not everyone in sports is happy with the optics of athletes and coaches receiving preferential treatment, but Japan and the IOC has prepared for that: “These doses will not interfere with Japan’s substandard incompetent vaccination program, because they are in addition to the ones Japan had done a bad job in procuring for individuals with higher priority.”
It’s like telling the poor that the additional billion dollars we’re giving to your wealthiest compatriots doesn’t affect you, because it is not coming from the money already earmarked for social welfare, but was given to us by the IOC.
It’s complete and utter bullshit, and so a perfect symbol for the Tokyo Olympics.
Perhaps if Japan asks nicely, the IOC will subsidize a program to allow Tokyo’s government to secretly clear the dead from the streets surrounding the Olympic village so as not to spoil the image of Tokyo 2020.
You may scoff, but what we’ve seen from Japan and the IOC so far suggests it’s possible.
