Welcome to Day 3,042 in Coronaville. It’s back to Lockdown 2.0 here in Manhattan Beach, California, where nobody can even get a haircut and as of Saturday you are liable to get a fine of up to $350 if seen in public without a mask and, to quote Alice Cooper, school’s out not for just summer but for a long time to come.
Looking out across the top of that mask, the United States on Thursday reported 75,600 new coronavirus cases, a single-day record. The situation is so bad across the 50 states — Thursday was the 11th time over the past month the single-day record had been broken — that, for now, Americans are not welcome in the European Union.
India, the New York Times also reported, hit a million cases in a surge that has forced a return to lockdowns there. India ranks third in the world in both total cases and new ones, the Times further said, adding that its rate of new infections is on track to overtake Brazil’s.
And what’s this?
The International Olympic Committee, capping a series of meetings with its first-ever virtual assembly on Friday, remained resolute in its determination to stage the Summer Olympics next July and early August in Tokyo.
IOC president Thomas Bach during Friday’s IOC assembly // IOC / Flickr
A year is a long time.
Maybe science will triumph. Perhaps there will be a vaccine, 11,000 or so athletes and thousands more coaches and journalists and broadcasters and fans can gather a year from now in the Tokyo heat and humidity and, in the end, in the optimistic eloquence of president Thomas Bach at a news conference following the IOC assembly, the Games “will celebrate the solidarity of humankind and will celebrate the resilience and will celebrate hope.”
Maybe.
But maybe now is the time for a reckoning.
A reimagining.
There is one — only one — metric that really matters for the IOC, and the Olympic movement, and that is to be relevant.
Problems can be fixed.
Relevance — relevance is systemic. It things go way south because of this pandemic, the IOC — and by extension, the Olympic movement — could well be looking at a lot of years without Games. Then what?
So let’s take a look at the big picture, and the next few years of the calendar, and note that the IOC is, at its core, an organization born in the 19th century seeking to manage its way into the 21st-century, with multibillion-dollar decisions (where to stage the Games) made on seemingly the thinnest of fact points (putting aside the deal-making and lack of transparency in voting), and ask:
Have the complexity, the scale and the scope of the Games outstripped the IOC’s ability to manage it?
In his remarks Friday, Bach said, “Already the ancient Greeks knew that every crisis offers opportunities.” It’s why, he said, a white paper he published April 29 — “Olympism and Corona,” recommended reading — sought to spark “discussion about the long-term impact of the crisis and even more importantly the opportunities for the Olympic movement.” The IOCs policy-making executive board, he said, would convene this December to “devise a working strategy for the post-corona Olympic world.”
Here is where it should start, because to be frank it can sometimes seem that McDonald’s might spend more time and thought planning where to put one of its outlets than the IOC an edition of its Games.
The IOC has for many years now very deliberately allocated risk, primarily to host cities.
It needs to itself take up way more responsibility and, moreover, this is a word it has for these same many years avoided, accountability.
Why?
It’s their brand.
It needs, wholesale, to reimagine — everything. In the spirit of being obvious, it’s really in the business of doing just three things:
1. how it selects host cities and nations
2. how it plans for a Games — four years, seven, in the case of Los Angeles 2028 - 11?
3. how it stages a Games
Now, about that calendar, and what might be what:
For context, in early March, it seemed all but impossible that the Games might not go on as scheduled in July 2020.
But that was BC time — Before COVID-19 went worldwide.
March brought Lockdown 1.0.
After three months of that, it seemed, let’s call it the end of June, there might be that figurative light at the end of the tunnel.
Now it’s crystal-clear we all live in a new, and different, world. Here in Southern California, the authorities literally declared the beaches off limits for the 4th of July national holiday. On Monday, the governor ordered Lockdown 2.0. As Bach said Friday when asked for certain details about a Tokyo Games and, again, to be fair, things might yet turn for the better: “In some countries, you cannot leave your house or what is happening tomorrow. How can you know the details of what is the most complex event in the world to organize maybe — all the details …. There cannot be a solution today. This is too much to be expected, I’m afraid.”
Meanwhile, insiders told Lausanne as far back as spring that if Tokyo is gone — that is, if it turns out the Summer Games end up being not just being postponed but canceled — it’s plain what domino falls next because February 2022 is just six short months after August 2021.
Beijing, and the Winter Games.
Let’s play this out then.
The IOC announced earlier this week that the Dakar Youth Games, scheduled for November 2022, would be pushed back to 2026. Allegedly the reason why, per Bach, is that five Games in three years “really was too heavy [a] workload for everybody.”
Does this pass the smell test?
It actually would be five Games in four years, not three: Tokyo ‘21; Beijing and Dakar in ‘22; Gangwon Youth Winter Games and Paris in ‘24.
The IOC is used to four Games in four years — the usual cycle (not including Youth Games) since 1994 — and for most of those years, that package of four managed to be overseen by a staff of several hundred fewer people at an IOC headquarters in Lausanne that was, shall we say, significantly smaller in grandeur and scope than Olympic House now.
So are we talking other matters, and in particular money?
It’s not a secret that in January the Senegalese government had not released the required funding.
More broadly:
The IOC’s financial picture — Bach and his predecessor, Jacques Rogge, deserve credit for this — would seem stable. But it’s worth noting, for instance, that longtime technology partner, Paris-based Atos, with 2019 revenues of $13.5 billion, last week re-upped its deal, but only through 2024.
2024 only? That’s like the prenup to a prenup.
Maybe there will be quantum technology changes by then. Or maybe Atos knows something.
The IOC has vowed hundreds of million toward its cost of a Tokyo Games (if they happen) — including, Bach keeps saying but almost no one keeps noticing, it’s tapping its reserves.
The IOC published its annual report this week. Turn to page 122. There it shows reserves as of the end of 2019 at $2.5 billion.
Sure, $2.5 billion is a lot — a lot — of money. But if you’re handing out hundreds of millions here and hundreds of millions there, eventually something has to give.
The question is, when does gradually become all of a sudden?
Rewind again:
The closing ceremony in PyeongChang was already two years ago-plus.
Gangwon Youth Winter ‘24? After the Dakar announcement, who can speak with confidence about the future of the Youth Games?
If, again if, no Tokyo 2021, no Beijing 2022, no Dakar 2022, that might well thus mean the next edition of an Olympics after PyeongChang 2018 would be Paris 2024. That’s six years.
Who wants to bet, meantime, that the taxpayers of France are going to be paying significantly for those Games, which the IOC said would never, ever happen under Agenda 2020 and the New Norm, its so-called reform plans?
Even before the coronavirus, how was Paris ’24 going to sell the $1.25 billion in domestic sponsorships its budget calls for? Remember last year, when they dissed the oil company Total on grounds of woke climate change?
2026? That would be Milano-Cortina. Who remembers the last Games in Italy, in Torino, in 2006? Great food, awesome wine, chaotic organization, worst — the worst — marketing program in the history of the Games.
Dakar in ‘26? We shall see.
That brings us to Los Angeles in 2028. Six years to Paris? How about 10 to LA? Ten years is a very long time to stay relevant in a TikTok world.
“We will have to give it our best to address the many challenges of an increasingly confrontational and ever more fragile world in deep crisis,” Bach said in his speech Friday to the IOC assembly.
A few words later, he used the word “fragile” again: “The fragile post-corona world needs the unifying power of the Olympic Games,” he declared.
But only if they can be held, and then only if the Games, and the organization in charge of them, and all of the pieces that make up the sprawling enterprise that is the Olympic movement, all of it — is relevant.
That leads to the dead-bang lesson of this pandemic, which is if not existential at the least elemental: nothing is a given.