A man wearing a face mask cycles past the Olympic Rings on Jan. 22, 2021 in Tokyo, Japan.Carl Court/Getty Images
As Japanese and Olympic leaders hold fast to plans for the Tokyo Games this summer, the COVID-19 troubles that have plagued the Australian Open tennis tournament offer a glimpse of the risk in organizing a major sporting event amidst a pandemic.
It’s an experience that, Australian health experts say, suggests holding an Olympics this year risks “disaster.”
Australia has laid meticulous plans to keep the virus from the courts. It chartered 17 flights to bring in some 1,270 players, coaches and other staff from around the world. It placed them in special hotels, arranging virus testing and a rigorous schedule to whisk players from their rooms to practice areas with police escorts on routes free of contact with other people. While the players practise, disinfection crews go to work. Workers at quarantine hotels are tested daily.
Even so, at least 11 people connected to the tournament have already tested positive, including Spanish player Paula Badosa, who had earlier complained about being placed into a strict quarantine after people on her flight – and two others – were found to have COVID-19.
The Olympics is immensely more complicated than a tennis tournament. The Tokyo Games was projected to involve more than 11,000 athletes alone, arriving on large numbers of flights from 206 countries. Competitions have been arranged for 10 different venues. Some 80,000 people have been selected as volunteers. The Athletes’ Village contains 26,000 beds. Organizers have sold millions of tickets.
Japanese officials have committed to holding the event, promptly rejecting a report in British newspaper The Times that, citing an anonymous source, said the Japanese government had privately concluded that playing host to the Games this year will be “too difficult.” On Friday, Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga said he was determined to press ahead with the Olympics. “It’s wrong and it’s ridiculous even having to comment on this,” Japan Olympic Committee chairman Yasuhiro Yamashita told Reuters. “There is no plan B,” International Olympic Committee chief Thomas Bach said.
But if the Australian Open cannot keep COVID-19 at bay, how can the Olympics?
Public-health experts have their doubts.
“It’s just a recipe for disaster,” said George Milne, a professor at the University of Western Australia who has modelled COVID-19 spread for state governments. People will be “flying in from countries where COVID-19 is raging,” he said, and athletes will be accommodated in the close quarters of a village that looks like “a classic breeding ground for any infectious disease.”
Complicating matters is Japan’s own domestic pandemic management. It has not employed lockdowns, relying instead on requests for voluntary co-operation that have been openly defied. Though Japan has reported lower rates of infection and death than most other major democracies, it has nonetheless seen a major epidemic spread.
On March 24, 2020, the day the Olympics were formally delayed by a year, Tokyo reported 16 new COVID-19 cases. On Friday, it reported 1,175 cases.
Holding the Games in Japan this summer “defies epidemiological logic,” said Michael Toole, an epidemiologist at the Melbourne-based Burnet Institute.
He compared the Japanese measures with the harsh lockdown that kept people in Melbourne under a nightly curfew for nearly four months, confined to within five kilometres of their homes and barred from more than an hour a day of outdoor exercise. Elements of that response “need to be adopted in Japan if they’re serious about going ahead with these Games,” Prof. Toole said.
Japan’s best hope of holding the Olympics lies in a broad vaccine rollout. But the country has yet to begin inoculations, as authorities have yet to approve a vaccine for use.
Still, there is domestic reason to push forward. Olympic organizers have estimated the Games budget at US$15.4-billion; Japanese auditors have said it’s likely in excess of US$25-billion – money that will have accomplished little in the event of cancellation. What happens with the Games also stands to offer judgment on Prime Minister Suga’s pandemic management.
“If they aren’t held, this will prove the huge failure of the virus prevention policy his cabinet has led, and will ultimately shake his whole political situation,” said Liu Jiangyong, an expert in Japanese studies at Tsinghua University.
What’s more, Japan has continued to stage its own domestic sports, even after its top-ranked sumo wrestler, Hakuho, tested positive for COVID-19 earlier this month.
And for a world staggered by the virus, the Olympics might offer a welcome distraction. “We do need to have some degree of hope – something to actually enjoy,” said Rob Grenfell, health director of the health and biosecurity business unit at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization in Australia.
Others hold out hope for the same. “The Canadian Olympic Committee has confidence that the Games can be staged safely and successfully,” the committee’s CEO, David Shoemaker, said Thursday.
Epidemiologists are far less optimistic.
The coronavirus is highly transmissible – and new variants even more so. Small numbers of cases explode into outbreaks in little time, and the world will not be vaccinated by summer.
Managing all that on the scale of the Olympics is “not impossible, I’m sure,” said David Murdoch, dean of the University of Otago in Christchurch, New Zealand.
“But gosh, the risk is really great.”
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