Straight Back to Tokyo

Well, things have been going okay at the Olympics so far.  Swimmer Chase Kalisz (below) won the first gold medal for the United States in the men's 400m individual medley, and Jagger Eaton - named for Mick Jagger - moved like Jagger enough to earn a bronze in skateboarding.  As I type this, I'm watching, for the first time since 2016, Simone Biles doing gymnastics routines in something other than a commercial featuring the always annoying Jonathan Van Ness.  

But it's early yet, and troubles abound.  Japan is still dealing with a worse COVID crisis than even the United States, and now the Japanese have another problem coming up - the weather.

It looks increasingly unlikely that the hurricane threat predicted by the Old Farmer's Almanac for the American Northeast in early August will come to pass, but Japan could be hit by a typhoon later this week.  See, eastern Asia is in the middle of typhoon season, which is precisely why the first Tokyo Olympics of 1964 were held in October (and why the 1988 Olympics in nearby Seoul were held in September).  Attention shoppers: just because the Olympics are called the "Summer Olympics" doesn't mean they have to be held in the summertime! They're not even officially called that, they're called the "Games of the Olympiad."  The first modern Olympiad of 1896 in Athens, remember, was held in April! 

COVID, of course, hardly pertains here.  Everyone in Japan has to be aware of what the weather is like at this time of year, and if COVID didn't exist, a possible typhoon would still be a problem.   So why hold an Olympiad in Tokyo in late July and early August in Japan when the autumn was clearly a better time?  My guess is that it has to do with TV scheduling.  I have a theory - feel free to disprove it with a comment - that rival commercial networks in Western countries but especially in the United States don't want the Olympics screwing up their season premieres, which are usually in the fall.  That was obviously not a problem in 1964, when satellite broadcasting was in its infancy.  So ABC in the U.S. had to air the 1964 Tokyo Games in October and crowd out counterprogramming on CBS and NBC; it's not like it adversely affected the chances of one of CBS's new sitcoms that fall - "Gilligan's Island!"

As for TV coverage in 2021, NBC and its sister cable and Spanish-language networks are doing a halfway decent job of covering them so far, though I sometimes suspect if some of the sportscasters hosting the coverage are actually in Tokyo.  Rebecca Lowe, for all I know, could be in a TV studio in Miami, the one where the moon landing was faked.  (That was a joke.) If that's the case, she's more likely to get COVID there than in Japan.  (That was not a joke.)     

Even if all goes well, the Japanese people have every right to be ticked off about the Games still going on, but, as I said before, there's too much money involved.  And if everything does work out, it'll be a shot in the arm (a metaphoric one) to know that nothing other than German megalomaniacs can stop the Olympics.

Not even terrorism, which I will talk about tomorrow as I look back at Atlanta in 1996.