Because of the coronavirus pandemic the world won’t be watching the Olympic athletes the next two weeks. Instead the athletes are watching the world… and making do.
The expectation was for a spectacle. Blindingly bright fireworks, inspiring Japanese music, breathtaking kimonos and a kaleidoscope of colors draped across the floor of Tokyo’s Olympic Stadium. Alex Obert would absorb it all marching behind the American flag, one of 11,000 athletes from 206 different countries, nearly all of them angling for face time on a television broadcast watched by half the world.
But the coronavirus pandemic changed everything.
Now, instead of participating in the Tokyo Olympics opening ceremonies on July 24, Obert has quite different plans.
Gyms are closed in Arizona, where the 28-year-old water polo player lives. The neighbors in Obert’s apartment building are less than understanding of the noise that accompanies the workouts of a 6-6,233-pound Olympian. And exercising in the sun-soaked July heat is unbearable at best, dangerous at worst.
So sometime around 8:30 Thursday morning, Obert will unfold his rubber yoga mat on the desert floor, in the shade beneath a Tucson overpass. He’ll connect his iPad to a Zoom call with his U. S. water polo teammates, grab the exercise bands in his backpack and virtually work out with his team. In other words, it will be like any other day during the pandemic.
«Sometimes there are pigeons when I arrive,» he said. «I haven’t seen any reptiles yet. It’s pretty wild. Definitely not normal.»
Swimmer Katie Ledecky describes how she and fellow Olympian Simone Manuel trained in a backyard pool near Stanford while everything was shut down due to the pandemic.
Nothing has been normal since March 24, when the International Olympic Committee and Tokyo Organizing Committee jointly announced the postponement of the 2020 Tokyo Games. Now, instead of opening ceremonies on July 24, there is uncertainty, disconnect, confusion and the very real possibility that the Games, now scheduled to begin a year later on July 23,2021, might never happen at all. In a survey conducted earlier this month by Japanese news agency Kyodo, just one in four Japanese citizens was in favor of hosting the Games in 2021. Thirty-six percent of respondents thought the Games should again be postponed, which International Olympic Committee president Thomas Bach has said will not happen. And 33% of respondents thought the Games should be canceled outright.
A seven-part story about influential coaching duo Bela and Martha Karolyi, how they transformed women’s gymnastics in the United States, and the steep price of all that gold. » Listen here
The IOC has put together a task force charged with building a simplified Games for next year, with limited or perhaps no spectators, scaled-back services and multiple precautions to prevent further spread of the coronavirus. Bach told French newspaper L’Equipe it would have been easier to cancel the Games than postpone them, but «we are there to organize the Games, not to cancel them.»
And thus the new plan, as outlined in a document released by the task force, boasts the postponed Games will «be a milestone in the world’s shared journey of recovery and a light at the end of the tunnel.» It adds «the Games will be a symbol of hope, resilience and the power of humanity working together as one.»
In the four months since the postponement was announced, there is one word athletes have learned more than any other: improvisation.
