Debate | Issue 9 | Trending | 2021

#Tokyo2020: Rings of Failure

By Lucy Wormald (she/her) I remember watching the opening ceremony of the London 2012 Summer Olympic Games. I was fourteen. The lights were low and I was sitting on the edge of my beanbag, with bated breath, eyes like saucers. The magnitude of creativity and stupendous effort of the ceremony, for the sake of beauty and brilliance and utter celebration, was moving. In all my innocence, I cried, oddly touched by the humanity of our world coming together to acknowledge our own grandeur.

I remember watching Mo Farah run in the Men’s 5,000 metres and 10,000 metres, unbridled joy in his eyes.

I remember watching Usain Bolt win three gold medals. I remember the force of Nicola Adams.

Whenever the Olympics come up in conversation I always find myself fiercely declaring my love for them. I am sold on the dream, drunk on its ideals. But this year, things feel different.

The opening ceremony of the Tokyo 2020 Summer Olympics was guarded. And so was my reaction. A little older, a little less naïve, and tempered by the presence of the pandemic, I could not lean in to what

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the Games aim to represent. Instead, I found myself uncomfortable with the corruption, the inequality, the health risk, the Games’ budget of $15.4 billion, that have been made stark by the global turmoil we find ourselves in.

In Japan, around 80% of the population have opposed hosting the Games. Terms such as ‘dumpster fire’, ‘cash grab’, and ‘moral disaster’ have been comfortably interchanged when describing the decision to run the Games while the pandemic still storms.

This moment of global unity, of audacious and joyful impracticality, of athletic triumph, now feels as rotten as everything else in our society. In a time where the Games feel reckless and negligent, is it irresponsible to ignore

the political framework of the Olympics?

Is it possible to still watch in good faith when aware of the complex moral contradictions it poses?

I think we should have known that keeping ‘2020’ at the end of the Tokyo Olympic Games title, despite it now taking place in 2021, was a terrible move that has undoubtedly brought all of last year’s bad juju back for another hot dose of carnage.

And lo and behold… the Tokyo Olympic Games have been fraught more than ever with ethical and social issues. This year’s event has, and will continue to be, severely diseased with inequality and injustice. The most striking of these issues is the choice to host the Games while the globe still battles a constantly changing pandemic.

In Japan, around 80% of the population have opposed hosting the Games. Terms such as ‘dumpster fire’, ‘cash grab’, and ‘moral disaster’ have been comfortably interchanged when describing the decision to run the Games while the pandemic still storms. Scientists and medical officials have been unequivocal in their opposition of the event. In a medical system already overstretched, Olympic officials have estimated it will need the services of 10,500 medical workers to staff the Games.