Think, and you may find bits and pieces of the Tokyo Olympics scattered somewhere among everything else you forgot happened during the pandemic. Lamont Marcell Jacobs’s victory in the men’s 100m could be near Joe Wicks’s home workouts, Mutaz Barshim’s decision to split a high jump gold medal with Gianmarco Tamberi right beside Gal Gadot’s celebrity singalong Imagine.
Piece the Games back together and they still seem like a fever dream, 17 days of sport in deserted stadiums built especially for the event, in the middle of a city that was in a state of emergency.
Everyone was on edge. There were more protesters outside the main stadium than there were spectators in it. A stray black bear was seen prowling around the softball arena, local officials started letting off firecrackers at night to scare him away. There was a surfing competition on tiny waves and a skatepark full of prodigiously talented teenage girls pulling backflips. Russia seemed to win everything, despite being officially banned from competing. Somewhere in among it all, a German modern pentathlon coach caused an international scandal by punching a horse.
When it was all over, the few people allowed in for the closing ceremony were asked to stand up for the International Olympic Committee president, Thomas Bach, while he waved to all four quarters of an imaginary crowd and then gave a speech during which he said “we did it”, with palpable relief.
Understandably so. The Tokyo Games was one of the great logistical feats and when it was over it was possible to believe, for a precious moment, it really had served some higher purpose and that everyone who participated left with a feeling of global community, a sense we were one people confronting one common problem.
Just so long as you forgot, as Bach seemed to, the Games were held against the wishes of a huge number of Japanese citizens, they went ahead only because of the hosting contract signed with the IOC and the country spent $6bn of public money on a party its own people weren’t allowed to attend. Once it was over, the hosts were so very keen for everyone to please leave that they gave athletes 48 hours to get out of the country. A year later, the Associated Press quoted a Japanese academic studying the legacy of the Games as saying “people don’t want to talk about it or even think about it”.
That was before the police started arresting members of the organising committee as part of an investigation into an enormous bribery and corruption scandal. Soon after, Sapporo’s bid to host the Winter Olympics in 2030 was quietly shelved for want of public support.
By then, Bach, the IOC and everyone else had long since moved on. The anticipation for the Paris Olympics had been building since their slice of the closing ceremony in Tokyo, a 15-minute video spectacular presented with a joie de vivre that made for a conspicuous contrast to the solemn goings on in Japan. For the IOC, Paris promised to be a peaceful and risk-free Olympics.
It signified a return to the west after a decade when they had two grimly dystopian Winter Games, in Sochi and Beijing, and a summer edition in Rio that was riddled with waste, corruption and worries about the Zika virus.
It is the first, too, to be organised entirely after the introduction of the IOC’s own Agenda 2020 reforms, which were meant to make the Games cheaper, more popular, more sustainable and more secure.
Well, life moves pretty quick in the 21st century. Before you know it the locals are planning to poo in the Seine in protest against you. If Tokyo ended up becoming the Covid Games, the Paris edition – taking place against the backdrop of the war in Ukraine, the conflict in the Middle East and the unavoidable sense that Emmanuel Macron’s own grand national project is listing beneath his feet – has already been reframed as the Conflict Games.
In an editorial published jointly by three leading French papers, Bach described them as taking place “at a time when the world is torn apart by so much conflict and division, people everywhere are fed up with all the hate, wars, and aggression”.
Bach is manoeuvring to win another term as IOC president, even though the IOC’s own anti‑corruption rules mean he is supposed to leave office in 2025. He is pitching Paris as a grandiose exercise in peace-making. “If their countries are in conflict or even at war, their athletes will compete while respecting the same rules,” he wrote. “They will be living peacefully together under one roof in the Olympic Village.”
The coverage of the ritual passing of the resolution of the Olympic Truce at the UN (Russia abstained) made great play of the fact that all 206 IOC members are going to be represented, even if Russia, this time, is confined to athletes who have apparently disavowed the war in Ukraine and the Afghan women, who are drawn from athletes in exile, have been disowned by their own government.
Paris won’t live up to these ambitions, any more than Tokyo did its own. But it will provide a long minute’s pause from the world, a welcome moment of distraction from our collective worries. The athletes will carry it through, like they always do, there will be noble failures, furious spats, horrific snarl-ups, dizzying moments of viral brilliance. It will be glorious in all sorts of ways, and awful in others, like always. But there will be fewer bears, you’d hope, and, thankfully, more fans.
