TOKYO — Like thunder rolling in the distance, there was a low rumble audible inside the stadium, on a Friday night when the Olympics held a moment of silence for the more than 4 million killed by a worldwide pandemic.
From my seat at the Opening Ceremony of the Summer Games, it sounded like trouble too serious to be ignored. So I got up and hustled outside a facility that cost $1.4 billion to be used as a television backdrop because fans have been banned from attending these Summer Games.
On the plaza surrounding this giant facility, policemen were calmly mobilizing. Out in the street, thousands of protesters, jammed so close together they shared every breath, snaked around several city blocks and shouted against the danger of holding the Summer Games as COVID-19 cases throughout Japan mount.
“Go to hell, Olympics!” the protesters chanted. “Stop the Opening Ceremony now!”
Hell-bent on having their displeasure heard this crowd seemed not to care they were breaking every social-distancing protocol we’ve been taught by doctors. Their anger was punctuated by banging on drums. Handmade signs bounced in the throng, one sign declaring the International Olympic Committee is “greed like the devil” and another insisting “Olympics kill the poor!”
Maybe I’m not smart enough to know if gathering side by side to denounce a big sports shindig while a highly infectious disease rages on qualifies as irony. But as we’ve discovered during the past 18 months, this pandemic has the capability to make us all act a little nutty.
During an Opening Ceremony like no Olympics has ever seen, if for no other reason than almost nobody was present in a massive waste of 68,000 seats as athletes from 205 countries marched, the evening began on a somber note, with an announcer asking for a silent tribute to “all the friends and loved ones lost, especially to COVID-19.”
But it sounded like lip service, if you ask me. We all know the Olympic show must go on because there’s too much money at stake. The debate about whether to hold the Summer Games, like many of our most intense COVID-19 arguments, pit commerce versus health, as if making a buck and being well are mutually exclusive.
Even the most cynical heart, however, can be warmed by the commitment of every wrestler and surfer that refused to be denied a chance at Olympic glory by the pandemic. When 26-year-old U.S. rugby player Nicole Heavirland marched in the stadium, she waved to a twin brother back home in Montana that she used to beat up as a kid, because there’s no rivalry like sibling rivalry. Don’t know about you, but that’s exactly the cheesy goodness that keeps me coming back to revel in the unabashed hokeyness of the Opening Ceremony.
Protest has long been part of the Olympic experience. Who can forget American track stars Tommie Smith and John Carlos giving a Black Power salute on the medal stand in Mexico back in 1968? Only five years ago, dissidents in Rio de Janeiro took to the streets, decrying the wasteful spending of untold billions on fun and games at a time the South American city desperately needed better hospitals and quality schools.
So what’s different about this protest against the bloated arrogance of the IOC? It has been certified and endorsed by mainstream, traditional power brokers in Japanese government, industry and media. For the first time, it feels as if the Olympic movement might not be too big to fail.
On the eve of the Opening Ceremony, senior IOC official Dick Pound, who revels in being a curmudgeon, dismissed the lack of a live audience at a made-for-TV event. “The crowd is largely irrelevant,” Pound told CBC correspondent Adrienne Arsenault from his home country of Canada. “Every once in a while, you give (the crowd) some lights to wave around.”
How dense and condescending can Pound be?
If we’ve learned anything from the pandemic, what makes sports such a powerful part of the human experience are the hugs and high-fives we missed exchanging when COVID-19 turned out the lights in the stadium.
Without no crowd in the stands, this Opening Ceremony felt more like a stuffy school assembly than a spontaneous party. Too much pomp and circumstance, too little passion, which can be neither staged nor faked.
All the fireworks in Japan couldn’t stop the event from being a dud.
The real buzz was outside, in the street, where protesters made the beautiful noise of hearts yearning to be heard.
