In this week's Sunday Long Read, Dvora Meyers asks that if in the Age of COVID and Black Lives Matter, the Olympics can and should even bother to exist. There's a non-zero chance that we've already seen the final Summer and Winter Games of the modern Olympics era.
A year ago, back when we were still allowed to gather in groups larger than a minyan, activists convened in Tokyo to talk about how they were going to end the biggest global gathering of them all — the Olympic Games.
The activists came from all over: past host cities like Rio, London, Nagano, and Pyeongchang; future host cities Paris and Los Angeles; cities that had managed to derail their bids, including Boston and Hamburg; and places like Jakarta, which is gearing up for a 2032 bid.
They were in Tokyo exactly a year out from the scheduled start of the 2020 Summer Olympic Games, attending the first-ever transnational anti-Olympic summit, which was organized by Hangorin no Kai, a group of unhoused and formerly unhoused people based in Tokyo. The activists, along with academics and members of the media, talked about common Games-related issues, like displacement and police militarization, and discussed strategies for resisting local political forces and the IOC to protect their communities. Elsewhere in Tokyo, Thomas Bach, President of the International Olympic Committee, and the rest of the IOC crew had arrived to mark the start of the 365-day countdown to the Opening Ceremonies.
Eight months after these two very different gatherings in Tokyo, the IOC announced that the 2020 Olympics were going to be postponed by a full year due to the COVID-19 global pandemic. By the time they made the announcement, most other major sports tournaments planned for the summer had been canceled or postponed and the athletes, many of whom were shut out of training facilities due to lockdowns, were calling on the IOC to act for over a week. Once the IOC made the inevitable official, the athletes were able to reset and refocus their training on July 2021.
That even a stripped-down version of the 2021 Games will happen is hardly a foregone conclusion. The pandemic may not be under control by then. Even if it is, and even if an effective vaccine against the coronavirus is developed in time, the Games still might not happen. The postponement is likely going to add billions to a budget that was already triple that of the original projection of the Tokyo bid that the IOC had accepted in 2013. Public opinion in Japan seems to be swinging against the Games, too. In a recent survey, 77 percent of respondents said that the Olympics could not be held next year. In another poll, a slim majority of Tokyo residents said the same thing.
The horrors of the pandemic are real and massive. Yet COVID-19 has offered an opportunity to derail the Games — one that didn’t exist just a few months ago and certainly hadn’t existed when the activists came to Tokyo last July. Dr. Satoko Itani, a professor of sport, gender, and sexuality studies at Kansai University, told me that the pandemic is a “powerful wake-up call to the people who otherwise wouldn’t have given a thought about the costs of the Olympics.”
“Now that a lot of people in Japan are counting and monitoring the government’s spending to fight the pandemic, it became ever more clear actually just how much taxpayers’ money we had allowed the TOCOG [Tokyo Organizing Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games] and the government to spend on the two-week-long sport spectacle while we don’t have enough money to equip ‘essential workers’ with the essential protective gear,” they wrote in an email.
The Games’ postponement is happening not just against the backdrop of a global pandemic, but also that of a global uprising against state-sanctioned murders of Black people by the police. The catalyst for this movement was the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis by Derek Chauvin, but the protests quickly spread beyond the Twin Cities to the rest of the U.S. and then around the world, including Japan.
The pandemic, police brutality, and the Olympics are not unconnected events. While COVID-19 might be a virus incapable of racial bias, the course it has taken through the population of the U.S., wending its way through Black, Latinx, and poor communities, was determined by decades of racist policy and discrimination. American police forces have killed Black people for decades with impunity as part of the same system that allowed more African Americans to die from COVID-19 than any other group. It’s also the system that has allowed the Olympic Games in the post-war period to reshape the cities that host the event, rarely for the benefit of all citizens. The Games have been a driving force behind displacement, police militarization, increased surveillance, and violence against the working class and poor people, especially Black and Brown, in the cities where they’ve touched down. The very same groups that the pandemic has disproportionately killed and that the police disproportionately target are those who become the victims, rather than the beneficiaries, of the Olympics.
But people are growing wise to what the Olympic Games are actually about. “It wasn’t 15, 20 years ago you could say, ‘We’re going to have a bid in our city,’ and stand behind the podium and jabber on about jobs and economic upticks floating everybody’s boat, and people just nodded along,” Jules Boykoff told me. (Boykoff is a professor at Pacific University and author of Power Games: A Political History of the Olympics and NOlympians: Inside the Fight Against Capitalist Mega-Sports in Los Angeles, Tokyo and Beyond.) “Today, no way. People aren’t nodding along like they once did.”
Over the last decade, residents of potential Olympic host cities have voted overwhelmingly to reject the Games. The IOC and local organizers have lost referenda in Hamburg, Calgary, Graubünden, Krakow, Munich, Sion, Vienna, and Innsbruck. Activists in other cities like Boston, Budapest, and Graz/Schladming managed to turn public opinion against the Games so decisively that the bids were pulled before the IOC and Olympic boosters could be embarrassed by yet another referendum loss. If the anti-Olympics activists have their way, soon no city will be a safe harbor for the Games.
The arguments after Beijing, London, and Rio especially were that the Olympics were a sign of governmental excess, that the billions each game cost should have been used on citizens, infrastructure and programs, not expensive stadiums and sports facilities.
The calculus on that just got a lot harder to use to justify holding the Games anymore. I don't think we'll see much of them in the future.
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