The COVID Olympics, AKA Japan’s Olympic-sized disaster

Japan’s Olympic-sized disaster

Lesson summary

Hi there everyone, welcome to Lesson 392 of Plain English, where we help you upgrade your English with current events and trending topics. Today is Monday, August 23, 2021. I’m Jeff. JR is here, too. He has posted the full lesson online at PlainEnglish.com/392.

Coming up today… these were not the Olympics that Japan envisioned. Tokyo postponed its Olympics during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, but organizers made the controversial decision to go ahead with the 2020 games this summer, in 2021. It wasn’t a total failure, but neither can it be described as a wonderful success for the host nation. The English expression today is “back away from” and we have a quote of the week.

An Olympic-sized disaster

Let’s start with the good news. The Olympics did not appear to be a COVID-19 super-spreader event. None of the competitions were canceled. The athletic competition was good. There wasn’t a terrorist attack or a natural disaster. A transgender athlete won a medal for the first time, and these Olympics featured more openly gay and lesbian athletes than all other previous Summer and Winter Olympic games in history combined. Japan won 58 medals overall, including 27 golds, which placed it third behind the U.S. and China. It was its best Olympics performance in every medal category, which is a source of pride for the host nation.

So, this is not to say that there was no good news from the 2020 Summer Olympics. Apart from the athletic competition, though, these Olympics rank somewhere between a disappointment and a disaster.

Let’s start with the financial impact. These Olympics were probably the most expensive in history, carrying a price tag of $15 to $20 billion, double the cost of the previous record-holder, London in 2012. And that hefty price tag doesn’t even include the cost of constructing Olympic venues including a 68,000-seat national stadium and two 15,000-seat sports arenas. Dozens of other venues were renovated; however, none featured any fans besides organizers, volunteers, and a smattering of VIPs. Constructing new stadiums for a two-week event is always a dubious value proposition; when that event has no fans to physically sit in the tens of thousands of new seats, it’s a fiasco.

With no fans in the seats, Japan lost out on the ticket revenue. But that wasn’t even the biggest blow. With no spectators allowed and the borders closed, Tokyo probably won’t experience the surge in tourism that typically follows hosting the Olympic Games. Perhaps they can hope for some lingering boost to publicity and tourism in the years to come, but I wouldn’t count on it. What lasting image did spectators get of Tokyo? They saw a city in lockdown, obsessive sanitation, and empty seats. That won’t have people rushing to buy plane tickets to Japan anytime soon.

At least there’s TV revenue, right? Not really. All the international TV revenue goes to the International Olympic Committee, not the organizing committee of the host country. The IOC, as the international Olympic body is known…they’re doing just fine. It’s the organizers in Tokyo, backed by the Japanese government, that have to bear the losses. Those are expected to be about $30 billion when all the bills are tallied up.

It’s not just the government and local Olympic organizers that are losing money either. A lot of Japan’s corporate sponsors backed away from supporting the games despite having written hefty checks. Toyota is Japan’s largest company and one of the top Olympics sponsors. They were expecting to ride a wave of positive vibes at home. But they didn’t run any Olympics-themed ads inside Japan, for fear of being associated with such an unpopular event.

As a large international company, Toyota can absorb the financial hit. But other national companies will have a harder time recovering from the blow. Asahi Breweries was counting on venues filled with fans drinking the “Tokyo 2020 Official Beer.” Asahi has a much lower international profile and the entire value proposition for this local brewer was fans in the stadiums and around the events drinking their product. They will now try to salvage their $100 million investment by promoting their beer to fans on TV and after the Games, but it won’t be the same. A local telecoms company wanted to demonstrate new augmented-reality technology to fans; with no fans, they had to settle for showing it to workers and volunteers, which doesn’t have the same impact.

One of the benefits of an Olympics is the ability to show the world how your country works. Brazil, China, and Russia all hosted Olympics intending to show that they can produce a successful mega-event. London’s Olympics showed that a crowded metropolis could still host an Olympics; it was part of the inspiration for Tokyo to take on the challenge. Though the athletic competition was generally a success this year, the image Japan presented to the world was not what it had hoped for. Japan was hoping this would be a reminder of its technological prowess and economic power in a region dominated by China. It would also be a comeback after a devastating tsunami ten years earlier.

Instead, these were the COVID Olympics; they were the Olympics the host country didn’t even want. Just weeks before the Opening Ceremonies, there was speculation that they might still be canceled. Japan’s public health leaders advised against having it and the local population didn’t want it. At the Opening Ceremonies, there was a moment of silence to acknowledge all the suffering from COVID-19, but the silence was broken by protesters outside the stadium, who argued the Games should have been canceled.

It was also the Olympics of conspicuous sanitation protocols. But conspicuous doesn’t necessarily mean effective. Some of the protocols were real head-scratchers. To cut down on the potential for athletes to spread the virus within the Olympic Village, organizers required athletes to spend the least possible time in Tokyo; many flew in just days before their events. However, many athletes came from places where case counts were high and vaccination rates were low. That made it more likely that they would bring COVID-19 to Tokyo undetected. Indeed, in the first few days, several athletes tested positive and had to miss their events. It might have made more sense for athletes to arrive more in advance and stay in a secure area to quarantine. About a fifth of the athletes weren’t even vaccinated.

The games followed 2020’s playbook for stopping the virus’s spread. Japan’s Olympic organizers were obsessively spraying surfaces, even though that is much less effective than once thought. Microphones were sprayed as they were passed from journalist to journalist in press conferences. Workers sprayed down areas that athletes touched. Spectators were asked to frequently use hand sanitizer.

Worst of all, the medal ceremonies didn’t feature someone placing a medal around a winning athlete’s neck. Instead, the medals were sanitized and presented on a tray and the athletes had to put them around their own necks. One journalist said the medal presentation looked like a cafeteria worker was serving the athletes a cheap lunch.

Time for a permanent home

I had a hard time watching these Olympics. I did watch some of it, but I just had a hard time separating my thoughts about the Olympics as a business and an institution from the competition and the athletes.

My view is that the Olympics are over-hyped. They’re extremely risky for host cities. The level of investment pushes cities to do things that are just not smart and so much money is wasted. The legacy of the Olympics doesn’t live up to the expectations; it’s so often unused stadiums and facilities.

I think they should end this sweepstakes to be the host city and pick a permanent home for the Summer Olympics and a permanent home for the Winter Olympics. But I doubt that will happen. There are too many people making too much money off the current system to ever want to change it.