Let the Games Begin Later

The International Olympic Committee has postponed the Tokyo Olympics.  Note that I did not refer to them as the "2020 Tokyo Olympics," as the coronavirus pandemic that necessitated the delay is not expected to subside before the end of this year.  Sports reporters are already saying that the spring of 2021 is the likeliest time the Games will be held.

And since the Olympic flame had already been lit in a solemn ceremony, there might as well be another solemn ceremony in which the flame is quietly put out before it even reaches the stadium.

I never understood why the Olympic organizing committee in Tokyo thought it would be a good idea to hold the Games in  late July and early August in the first place.  East Asian summers are notorious for their volatile weather, which is why the 1964 Tokyo Olympics were held in October and why the canceled 1940 Tokyo Olympics (Japan was too busy conquering the Pacific to stage them) had been scheduled for late September and early October.  Had the Chinese gotten ahead of this virus sooner, as they did with SARS in 2002 and 2003 and H1N1 in 2009, or even if the rest of the world had done so and followed the example of South Korea, which was on the virus crisis in a New York minute, it might have been possible to postpone the Tokyo Olympics until early fall. Now that the virus could hit in a second wave by then, 2021 is thus the target date.  Heck, I'd bet on 2022, because who knows if the virus will be under control by next year?  Speaking of 2022, Beijing is holding the Winter Olympics that year, which seems rather foolish in light of the foul-ups, bleeps and blunders in China's initial handling of the outbreak and already seemed foolish given that Beijing already held the 2008 Games (which wasn't too long ago in the Big Bang scheme of things).  Now is the time to move the Winter Games.

Given the fragility of the environment and the numerous health crises we've had on this planet in the past decade, I would expect to see the Olympics revert to their original state as a low-key sporting event without a lot of pomp and circumstance.  A few of the first Olympiads were in fact held as world's fair sideshows.  The staging of the Games as a grand spectacle actually started with Adolf Hitler's display of nationalism at the 1936 Berlin Games (below), with the 1936 Winter Olympics in the German skiing town of Garmisch-Partenkirchen having offered a sneak preview of the bigger event.  (Nineteen thirty-six was the third - and, understandably, last - time in which the Winter and Summer Games both took place in the same country in the same year.)

So, yes, all of the gaudy opening ceremonies of subsequent Olympiads were the unintended consequence of Berlin 1936.  Heck, the Atlanta Olympic opening ceremony of 1996 was so overblown it seemed like the only thing that could redeem it was if Muhammad Ali were to light the cauldron; thankfully, that's exactly what happened.  And the expensive facilities, the outrageous ticket prices, and the asinine coverage offered by corporate television helped make the Games into a huge, bloated affair, even the once-intimate Winter Olympics.  It just gets more and more costly to stage them; Tokyo got the Games of the XXXII Olympiad by default, because so few cities were interested in bidding for them due to concerns over cost.  It's time to scale them back, bring them back to where they were in the early decades of the Olympic movement, and concentrate on the whole raison d'être for the Games - sport.

And now for something completely different - sport! ;-)