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If you're of a certain age, you recall the Olympics as a singular, epic event.
You remember the musical preamble, the horns, the pageantry, the regal voice of Jim McKay as emcee of the games. You remember Al Michaels frantically ask us about miracles in Lake Placid in 1980. You remember the best amateur boxing team in history — Mark Breland, Pernell Whitaker, Meldrick Taylor and Evander Holyfield — invading the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles. We remember Bobby Knight's gold-medal basketball team that year, led by Michael Jordan. (Somehow, Charles Barkley was snubbed while Leon Wood, Joe Kleine, Jeff Turner and Vern Fleming made the squad.) And, of course, you remember the Dream Team, when the United States, led by 11 Hall of Famers, dropped the hardwood hammer on Barcelona in 1992.
Since then, the Olympics have lost some of their edge, their prerogative as the biggest sports competition of the Olympiad, on the planet. We used to greet the games every four years with frothing anticipation. But between revelations about PEDs in people who play the games, rampant corruption by people who run the games and the saturation of professional athletes, the Olympics have been booted down the sports page.
Japan has been insisting that the 2020 summer games will go on as scheduled. As recently as Sunday, Japan assured us that the July 24 start date will not be postponed or pushed a single day. The International Olympic Committee has officially asserted that "cancellation is not on the agenda,” but says it is now considering a postponement and will make a final decision within four weeks.
Postponing it a year should be a no-brainer.
Carl Court/Getty Images With all due respect to the IOC, Japan and the city of Tokyo, there's a serious disconnect between what they want and what they will get. Canada has made it clear it will not fly in July to Tokyo for the games. Australia has told its people to prep for 2021. But it should not matter who makes such proclamations. Just look outside. Watch a TV. Open a laptop. The world is shutting down. This coronavirus, more specifically called COVID-19, is spreading exponentially across the globe.
Even the United States, with all our military and monetary might, has been reduced to ghost towns and empty roads and makeshift medical tents freckling the land. We're in a self-imposed lockdown, our economy reduced to rubble, with cable networks devoting all their manpower to updates, morbid body counts and overwhelmed doctors trying to make sense of it all.
We have no sports. The NBA and NHL have suspended their seasons indefinitely, and MLB has kicked opening day down to May. All we have — and we are so grateful for it — is the NFL machine churning out trades, free agent signings and rampant rumors. Only the NFL can produce pandemic-proof news, with Tom Brady abandoning his throne in New England for the warmer, if not more fertile, pastures of Tampa.
Yet the IOC and Japan are living in this dream bubble where we spank COVID-19 into deep space, resume our lives in a few weeks and then the world's Olympians keep training as though nothing had happened. July 24 may sound like a lifetime away, but April is around the corner, May is down the block, and June is one subway stop away. There is no logic, science or scientist supporting this delusion over the Olympics.
It's true that sports serve as a spiritual balm on a free society. America turned to baseball during World War II, and after 9/11. But unlike those ugly moments in history, this enemy doesn't wear a uniform, have a home base, a voice or a face. There is no territory to lose or gain. We only have advice, urging and orders to live an entirely counterintuitive life, to stay home and watch movies all day.
For the most part, we are heeding the experts, bracing for baleful updates, and hoping for the best. We know sports, like all inessential industries, have been kicked to the curb for a while. Commissioner Adam Silver had the prescience to suspend the NBA season on March 12. Yet the Olympics, with all their diplomats and dinosaurs, are holding out hope the games will happen this year. In the middle of a virus they are given to vice, picking greed over need.
Let us heal in 2020, and let the games begin in 2021.