The 2020 Tokyo Olympics were a "suicide mission", warned one of Japan's richest men. "Cursed", said a former prime minister. Even contemplating hosting them in the midst of Covid would be "simply beyond reason", said one sponsor.
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 pandemic-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 didn't save the government of 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 in order to save the competition.
As the pandemic continued, calls grew for a cancellation. An erroneous and swiftly denied report in The Times of London in January 2021 declared that the "government has privately concluded that the Tokyo Olympics will have to be cancelled". When that didn't materialise, the cacophony became deafening. The US issued a do-not-travel warning a few weeks before the Games, only to retract it later.
There's no doubt that the Games themselves were odd, from the socially distanced torch relay to the masked, low-budget, and poignant opening ceremony. But 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 football championship that same summer were fine.
The 100,000 or so people who arrived for the Games represented an increase of just a quarter of one percent of the population of the greater Tokyo region. And they were isolated, mostly vaccinated, masked and taking precautions in a country where this common-sense approach had largely worked to contain the virus. In the end, only around 500 people involved with the event contracted Covid: the Olympic bubble was the safest place one could possibly be in.
There had been a vocal anti-Olympics movement since the moment Japan won the 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 nuclear plant, some 300 kilometres away. For others, the Olympics became the focus of Covid-era curmudgeons, following the same line of thinking that, in some countries earlier in the pandemic, forbade outdoor activities. Holding the Games gave people licence 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'll ever live again in a city that will host the Olympics. But that's a minor inconvenience compared to the athletes who had trained years for this moment. Predictably, once the event began, opposition quickly melted away, and the competitors took centre 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 their 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 cases during the Olympics.
Nonetheless, a poll immediately after the Games showed 64% 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. But it did the best with the hand it was dealt. An outright cancellation 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. I'm glad this wasn't one of them. ©2024 Bloomberg
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.
