There will be music and speeches, and a handoff to Paris for the 2024 Games.
The details of the Tokyo Olympics closing ceremony are closely guarded before it begins. And the coronavirus pandemic has changed a lot. But based on the closing ceremonies of the recent past, we can still safely predict some of what we’ll see starting at 8 p.m. Tokyo time on Sunday night (7 a.m. Eastern). Unlike in the opening ceremony, when athletes march in by country, they file into the stadium en masse at the closing ceremony, symbolically indicating that we are all one people. It’s like one of the final rooms of the “It’s a Small World” ride at Disneyland. You will probably note that for the most part, the athletes come in roughly clustered by nation anyway. Expect fewer athletes than in years past. At these Games, for pandemic-related reasons, athletes are being told to leave Japan 48 hours after their last event. So many of your favorites might well have already flown home. Samba in Rio de Janeiro, Britpop in London, the music of the host nation normally features heavily in the closing ceremony.
