And it all started so smoothly, too. A frictionless dawn trip through the Olympic labyrinth, navigating all those buses and badges and scans and forms and apps and depots and checkpoints, two temperature checks, a ticketing desk, a list cross-referenced with an email verification, a bag scan and a pat down. The huge and intricate machinery of the Tokyo Games had come to life, tens of thousands of journalists and athletes and officials whizzing hither and thither from hotel to transport hub to, in my case, Tokyo Bay and Shizuma Park. This was the venue of Japan’s match against the Czech Republic in the women’s beach volleyball, the opening game on the opening morning of the Olympics. There’s always a nervous uncertainty on the first morning. This time, inevitably, there was a little extra anxiety, the mutual paranoia of people pressed up together in close proximity again. This was soon cut through by all the enthusiastic smiles and shouts of “Ohayo!” and “Welcome!” from friendly volunteers with no one else to talk to. Then I met an Australian: “Have you not heard the news mate? The match has been cancelled. One of the Czech players tested positive.” I did wonder why I’d had the 7am bus to the venue all to myself. So the happy Japanese team got a walkover, and the hapless Czechs got sent to quarantine, their Games over before it had even started. It was Marketa Slukova who failed the test, the fifth of six members of the Czech team to be diagnosed with Covid this week. The first one was a doctor with the tennis squad. According to the Czech press, he’s a confirmed vaccine-sceptic who has previously advocated mouthwash as effective protection against Covid-19. That didn’t help Slukova or any of the other Czech athletes stuck on a charter flight with him. The Czech prime minister has described it as “a scandal”. The national Olympic committee has launched an investigation. Slukova, who had been planning to quit after these Olympics so she could start a family said: “We cried, then we swore, then we cried again.”After four years of the Olympic cycle, another year of delay, and four days in quarantine, the rest of us could manage one more hour of waiting. At 10am, they started a men’s game, Argentina v Brazil. The last time I saw one of the two Brazilians, Alison Cerutti, it was on Copacabana beach in 2016, where he celebrated winning the gold by running into the rapturous crowd of 12,000 and hugging the random strangers he met there. “You made all the difference,” he told them afterwards, “you were our third man.” Four years before that, Cerutti played in the final on the Horse Guards Parade, in front of one of the happiest crowds in London. Here in Tokyo they had the sea, the sand, and even too much of the sun, which is so pitilessly hot that they had to stop some of the matches earlier in the week because the sand was burning the players’ feet. They even managed a Sérgio Mendes soundtrack. But they didn’t have an audience. I counted one DJ, one MC,
All data is taken from the source: https://www.theguardian.com/
Article Link: https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2021/jul/24/surreal-spectacle-of-a-superbly-set-up-olympics-with-no-one-here-to-enjoy-it
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