In defense of Tokyo 2020, the loneliest Olympics

The 2020 Tokyo Olympics were a “suicide mission,” one of Japan’s richest men said.

“Cursed,” a former prime minister said.

Even contemplating hosting them in the midst of the COVID19 pandemic would be “simply beyond reason,” one sponsor said.

In July 2021, as Japan prepared to host the year-delayed event, the drumbeat of a disaster waiting to happen was overwhelming.

No comparison was too outlandish: The COVID-19-era Games would be as bizarre as the “Nazi 1936 Olympics in Berlin,” while the sense of a government dragging an unwilling public to disaster was compared to World War II “when the Japanese public did not want the conflict, but no leader dared halt it.”

As Paris prepares to light the Olympic torch, my thoughts have turned to how this narrative has fared in the three years since.

Disaster clearly did not occur; there was no super-spreader event and no Olympic variant manifested itself. Nonetheless, the success did not save the government of former Japanese prime minister Yoshihide Suga, who pushed for the Games to take place.

From the very first days of the pandemic, the virus and the Olympics were intertwined. The unprecedented decision in March 2020 to delay the Games brought home the reality of the pandemic. Before that, critics accused the government, without evidence, of downplaying the number of cases to save the competition.

As the pandemic continued, calls grew for a cancelation. An erroneous and swiftly denied report in the The Times in January 2021 said that the “government has privately concluded that the Tokyo Olympics will have to be canceled.”

When that did not materialize, the cacophony became deafening. The US issued a do not travel warning a few weeks before the Games, only to retract it later.

There is no doubt that the Games themselves were odd, from the socially distanced torch relay to the masked, low-budget and poignant opening ceremony.

However, were they dangerous? Was hosting them the irresponsible, disaster-inviting decision it was made out to be?

That argument never made much sense to me. With international borders still closed, foreign spectators had been ruled out at an early stage.

Japan had never been a “COVID zero” country. That meant the argument that the event was uniquely threatening went out the window. Even with our knowledge of the vaccines in 2021, it was never clear why a spectator-less Olympics was dangerous, while stadiums packed with unmasked, singing crowds at the Euro 2020 soccer championship that same summer were fine.

The 100,000 or so people who arrived for the Games represented an increase of just one-quarter of 1 percent of the population of the greater Tokyo region. They were isolated, mostly vaccinated, masked and taking precautions in a country where this commonsense approach had largely worked to contain the virus. In the end, only about 500 people involved with the event contracted COVID-19.

The Olympic bubble was the safest place one could possibly be.

There had been a vocal antiOlympics movement since the moment Japan won the hosting rights in 2013. Tokyo’s heat would lead to mass deaths among spectators and athletes; if not from that, then from radiation from the wrecked Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant, some 300km away.

For others, the Olympics became the focus of COVID-19era curmudgeons, following the same line of thinking that, in some countries earlier in the pandemic, forbade outdoor activities. Holding the Games gave people license to disobey official calls to restrict their activities, went one particularly specious argument.

The lack of spectators was disappointing, if understandable.

I myself had won tickets for the weightlifting in the initial lottery; it seems unlikely I would ever live again in a city that would host the Olympics.

However, that is a minor inconvenience compared with the athletes who had trained years for this moment. Predictably, once the event began, opposition quickly melted away and the competitors took center stage.

The record haul of medals the host nation took home helped, from Momiji Nishiya’s first place in skateboarding at the age of just 13, to the brother-and-sister combination of Hifumi and Uta Abe who won gold medals in judo, to the remarkable upset of China in the table tennis mixed doubles.

And from Italy’s surprising track and field wins to Simone Biles overcoming mental health issues, narratives of success overshadowed predictions of looming disaster.

The event, of course, had its challenges. The bid-rigging scandal that subsequently came to light has tainted the success, and torpedoed Sapporo’s 2030 Winter Olympics bid. The Games came in far over budget, with a mixed legacy for the newly built stadiums.

Japan more broadly did experience another wave of COVID-19 cases during the Olympics.

Nonetheless, a poll immediately after the Games showed 64 percent were glad they had been held. Even a year later, a majority still approved. Nearly two-thirds said they wanted Japan to host the Games again.

Japan did not get to show itself to the world in the way it expected when it won the vote in 2013. However, it did the best with the hand it was dealt. An outright cancelation would have been a disaster, both economically and for national pride.

While the Games did not become the “proof of overcoming the virus” that Japan pitched it as, they did demonstrate that hardship can be overcome through human ingenuity, and that narratives that sound compelling — that it was simply impossible to safely hold the Olympics in the midst of a pandemic — are not necessarily true.

Groupthink and tunnel vision blighted many aspects of the world’s response to COVID-19. I’m glad this was not one of them.

Gearoid Reidy is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering Japan and the Koreas. He previously led the Breaking News team in North Asia, and was the Tokyo deputy bureau chief. This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.