We’re deep into 2021 and the 2020 Tokyo Olympics are finally over, and it is time to assess the damage done to the host city over the past eight years. These Games, which exacted both a terrible financial and human cost upon the host city of Tokyo while garnering the lowest American ratings in the recent history of the Olympics, are quickly being reframed as having a “mixed legacy” or even “courageous.” This is absolute bullshit, but given how little the average person paid attention to these games, it has a risk of sticking. And at the center of this reframing are two big lies related to the relationship between Covid and the Tokyo Olympics: the Olympics did not make Covid worse in Japan, and the Games were only a failure because of Covid. We’re going to debunk them both now:
LIE #1: THE OLYMPICS DID NOT MAKE COVID WORSE IN TOKYO.
You will hear that the so-called “Olympic bubble” held because only 430 or so people tested positive within the bubble. First of all, that number is not great! While it suggests that the Olympic bubble did not suffer a catastrophic outbreak, that is still hundreds of lives altered in the name of the Olympics. But we have to look beyond the bubble to see the real cost of the Games: The most recent spike in Covid infections in Japan amidst Tokyo 2020 points to our core analysis that the Olympics destroy the lives of vulnerable people in the cities that host them.
Tokyo and Japan as a whole have suffered through an unprecedented surge in Covid infections, with almost daily broken records in terms of both confirmed cases and hospitalizations. And while IOC president Thomas Bach urges that we cannot be sure that had anything to do with the Olympics, he’s only perpetuating classic IOC bullshit. The IOC will shirk responsibility for any negative impact of the Games, whether it’s related to corruption, economic disasters, or the direct human toll of the Games. But in this case, it’s very easy to see why Bach is blatantly dishonest.
First of all, there was a massive diversion of resources away from the people of Japan and towards the Olympics. The Olympic bubble had more tests done everyday than the rest of Tokyo combined by a 3 to 1 ratio. Additionally vaccination rates in the bubble were almost triple those in the city as a whole. Through any lens that values the life of the average resident of Tokyo, this was a blatant misuse of resources. But of course, that is the Olympics’ modus operandi in a nutshell; whatever it takes to get through two weeks, the well-being of the host city be damned.
And even with this misallocation of Covid tests and vaccines, the outcomes were not good! All of this created conditions where the infection rate was still 100 per 10 thousand members of the Olympic Bubble (430 out of a reported 42,000 members of the bubble) in a one month period. Again, not good, despite what the headlines say!
Secondly, there was the impact of the Games on behavior. After a year and a half of states of emergency, there was significant anecdotal and statistical evidence that demanding another state of emergency so the Games could go off without a hitch was a bridge too far for the people of Japan. The Games were wildly unpopular, and yet because of how the IOC structures its host city contracts, the people of Japan were powerless to have their voice heard. This abstract sense of powerlessness led to verifiable changes in behavior compared to previous states of emergency. People were moving around more and less cautiously.
The outcome: record infections on an almost daily basis during the Games. And with the Paralympics about to start, experts are saying that cases have not even peaked yet. The IOC claims to deliver hope through the Games; this Covid outbreak is a direct case of the Olympics’ undemocratic nature bringing hopelessness to a host city with deadly effect.
Finally there are the direct effects. It has recently been reported that the government of Japan had covered up the introduction of variants of the disease into the country to bolster support for the Games. This gave the populace an inaccurate sense of the danger of the spreading disease, leading directly to more infections. Further, 2/3 of those infected within the bubble live in Japan, and are now at risk of spreading the disease in the country. The test positivity rate in the country is over 20%, which suggests endemic and widespread transmission of the Delta variant throughout the country, yet without the testing mechanism necessary to even attempt contact tracing. Basically, most of the cases in the Olympic bubble risk exacerbating the contagion in the rest of Japan. All of this is happening at a moment when the hospital system is collapsing under the strain of this unprecedented wave of infections. Also, as we all have learned over the past 18 months, it takes up to two weeks for Covid to incubate, meaning we still don’t know the full impact. To say that the Games did not make Covid worse and Tokyo, and to even go so far as to breathe a sigh of relief? That’s the sort of ludicrous disregard for the welfare of the residents of a host city that only the IOC and its boosters could muster.
LIE #2: THINGS WOULD HAVE BEEN DIFFERENT IF IT WEREN’T FOR COVID.
The intersectional impact of Covid on a host nation of the Olympics is only a symptom of the disease that takes hold when the Olympics come to town. The Olympics create the conditions, much like a natural disaster, for the speedy consolidation of wealth in the hands of a select few while the rights of the many are trampled. And in the case of Tokyo, for so many the damage had been done pre-Covid. There were roughly 200 public housing residents displaced years ago, the second time many of them lost their homes because of the Olympics. There are the many unhoused residents of Tokyo who faced unprecedented police brutality as public space was privatized en masse throughout the city. Despite the lack of foreign visitors, the security apparatus in Tokyo ramped up in the same way it does in every host city, infringing upon civil liberties. For these displaced and persecuted residents the damage was done before the Games began, and their personal disasters were wrought before we even knew what Covid was. The evictions of over 22,000 residents and harassment of the unhoused started, as they always do, in the run up to the Games, and the enclosure of public space and exclusion of the poor from the city was sealed years ago.
There were other Olympic disasters in Tokyo that had nothing to do with Covid. While Covid related delays cost the city of Tokyo billions in cost overruns, they were already over ten billion dollars over budget before the delays hit. Also the fact that so many on the executive and creative teams behind the Games were forced to resign in disgrace for corruption, bullying, misogyny, and racism had nothing to do with Covid, and everything to do with the retrograde, conservative leadership that foisted the Games upon Tokyo. For a host that was supposed to be “sure hands,” for the Games, Tokyo proved to be anything but.
But there’s a bigger reason why chalking up the failures of Tokyo to the pandemic doesn’t work: the Olympics are built to succumb to disasters, not overcome them. Because the host city gets remade for a television spectacle that lasts only two weeks, the time pressure the Games present makes them vulnerable to not just pandemics but any sort of problem, either manmade or natural. Setting aside Covid, the miserable heat the Games were played under was both easy to anticipate (unless you read the Tokyo Olympic bid book’s flagrantly dishonest description of the summer weather in the prefecture) and impossible to avoid. Once the Games were scheduled to satisfy the needs of American broadcasters, the country was locked into a situation they had no capacity to escape from.
What makes this “limited time” component of the Olympics especially pernicious is that it drives the suffering of the average resident of the host city, while allowing for the powers that profit from the Olympics more opportunities to extract wealth from the area. When we talk about cost overruns (Japanese government auditors have reported that total spending was upwards of $20 billion, almost three times the original forecast of around $7.4 billion), someone is getting paid those costs; these crises are opportunities for large companies to demand increased payments to accelerate work so that the host city does not suffer the embarrassment of an incomplete Olympic project when the Games begin. Once the Olympics come to town, all negotiating power is lost for the people of the city, and private interests with access to power reap the benefits. Covid was just one of many such opportunities for the rapacious forces that extracted billions from the city of Tokyo for an event that excluded the city and exacerbated the pandemic.
The irony here is that the Tokyo Olympics were branded as “the Recovery Games,” as the nation rebounded from the Fukushima disaster of 2011. Of course, a big sporting event hundreds of miles away nine years later that siphoned resources away from the nuclear cleanup in Fukushima was never going to help the region recover. But it’s also not surprising that the Olympics would in fact compound the Fukushima tragedy by making another crisis worse. This is what the Olympics does, always, everywhere. And then they twist the narrative to make it clear that whatever went wrong in a given host city was some unforeseeable unique set of circumstances. But the underlying realities of every Olympics are the same: the residents of the host city suffer so a very small number of people can profit by using the Games as a cudgel.
So please, do not be fooled by the reframing that will be done in the coming weeks and months. Tokyo did not escape the Covid Games unscathed as the IOC would have you believe, and the Games themselves were always doomed to punish the most vulnerable members of society regardless of Covid. And when the boosters of the LA 28 Games try to tell you that Tokyo wasn’t so bad, and nothing like that could happen again anyway, do not believe their lies.