In defense of Tokyo 2020, the loneliest Olympics

The 2020 Tokyo Olympics were a "suicide mission,” warned one of Japan’s richest men. "Cursed,” said a former prime minister. Even contemplating hosting them in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic would be "simply beyond reason,” said one sponsor.

In July 2021, as Japan prepared to host the year-delayed event, the drumbeat of a disaster waiting to happen was overwhelming. No comparison was too outlandish: The pandemic-era Games would be as bizarre as the "Nazi 1936 Olympics in Berlin,” while the sense of a government dragging an unwilling public to disaster was compared to World War II "when the Japanese public did not want the conflict but no leader dared halt it.”

As Paris prepares to light the Olympic torch, my thoughts have turned to how this narrative has fared in the three years since. Disaster clearly did not occur: There was no superspreader event and no Olympic variant of the virus manifested itself. Nonetheless, the success did not save the government of former Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga, who pushed for the Games to go on.

From the very first days of the pandemic, the virus and the Olympics were intertwined. The unprecedented decision in March 2020 to delay the Games brought home the reality of the pandemic. Before that, critics accused the government, without evidence, of downplaying the number of cases to save the competition.

As the pandemic continued, calls grew for a cancellation. An erroneous and swiftly denied report in the The Times of London in January 2021 declared that the "government has privately concluded that the Tokyo Olympics will have to be canceled.” When that did not materialize, the cacophony became deafening. The United States issued a do-not-travel warning a few weeks before the Games, only to retract it later.

There is no doubt that the Olympics themselves were odd, from the socially distanced torch relay to the masked, low-budget and poignant opening ceremony. But were they dangerous? Was hosting them the irresponsible, disaster-inviting decision it was made out to be? That argument never made much sense to me. With international borders still closed, foreign spectators had been ruled out at an early stage.

Japan had never been a "Zero-COVID" country. That meant the argument that the event was uniquely threatening went out the window. Even with our knowledge of vaccines in 2021, it was never clear why a spectator-less Olympics was dangerous, while stadiums packed with unmasked, singing crowds at the Euro 2020 football championship that same summer were fine.

The 100,000 or so people who arrived for the Tokyo Games represented an increase of just one-quarter of 1% of the population of the greater Tokyo region. And they were isolated, mostly vaccinated, masked and taking precautions in a country where this common-sense approach had largely worked to contain the virus.

In the end, only around 500 people involved with the event contracted COVID-19. The Olympic bubble was the safest place one could possibly be in.

There had been a vocal anti-Olympics movement since the moment Japan won the rights in 2013: Tokyo’s heat would lead to mass deaths among spectators and athletes; if not from that, then from radiation from the wrecked Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant, some 300 kilometers away.

For others, the Olympics became the focus of COVID-era curmudgeons, following the same line of thinking that in some countries forbade outdoor activities earlier in the pandemic. Holding the Games gave people license to disobey official calls to restrict their activities, went one particularly specious argument.

The lack of spectators was disappointing, if understandable. I myself had won tickets for the weightlifting in the initial lottery (and it seems unlikely that I will ever again live in a city that will host the Olympics). But that is a minor inconvenience compared to the athletes who had trained years for that moment. Predictably, once the event began, opposition quickly melted away and the competitors took center stage.

The record haul of medals the host nation took home helped, from Momiji Nishiya’s first place in skateboarding at the age of just 13, to the brother-and-sister combination of Hifumi and Uta Abe who won gold medals in judo, to the remarkable upset of China in the table tennis mixed doubles. And from Italy’s surprising track-and-field wins to American gymnast Simone Biles overcoming mental health issues, narratives of success overshadowed predictions of looming disaster.

The event, of course, had its challenges. The bid-rigging scandal that subsequently came to light has tainted the success of the Tokyo Games and torpedoed Sapporo’s 2030 Winter Olympics bid. The capital's Summer Games came in far over budget, with a mixed legacy for the newly built stadiums. Japan more broadly did experience another wave of COVID-19 cases during the Olympics.

Nonetheless, a poll immediately after the Games showed 64% of respondents were glad the event had been held. Even a year later, a majority still approved. Nearly two-thirds said they wanted Japan to host the Games again.

Japan did not get to show itself to the world in the way it expected when it won the vote in 2013. But it did the best with the hand it was dealt. An outright cancellation would have been a disaster, both economically and for national pride.

While the Games did not become the "proof of overcoming the virus” that Japan pitched it as, they did demonstrate that hardship can be conquered through human ingenuity and that narratives that sound compelling — that it was simply impossible to safely hold the Olympics in the midst of a pandemic — are not necessarily true.

Group think and tunnel vision blighted many aspects of the world’s response to COVID-19. I am glad this was not one of them.