After being postponed for a year due to COVID-19, athletes gathered from across the globe to compete for gold medals in the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. Across the host country, familiar motions took place. Gymnasts flipped and raised their arms. Soccer players masterfully dribbled balls up and down fields. Dressage horses performed piaffes and pirouettes.
But one unignorable difference remained. Athletes are running, kicking, spinning and swimming to the tune of fanless silence this year, a sombre reminder of the COVID-19 pandemic that rages on in Tokyo and much of the world.
Only at a few far-flung events — like soccer matches in the northern prefecture of Miyagi — have fans been allowed to enter. Even then, capacities are severely limited.
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Just two days before the Games began, the Japanese capital reported 1,832 new cases of the virus, rapidly rising to a six-month high.
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Tokyo 2020 officials banned spectators from all sporting events, stadiums and Olympic venues on July 8 after a sudden surge in cases of the highly infectious Delta variant forced Japan to declare a public health emergency.
The Olympic village is far from empty, though. Around 11,500 athletes are expected in Japan to compete, while another estimated 79,000 journalists, officials and staff are also expected to be in attendance.
As of Sunday, 79 people connected to the Tokyo Olympics had tested positive for COVID-19.
Athletes from around the world, including Canada, took part in the opening ceremony for the Tokyo Olympics. The 2020 games, which will run until Aug. 8. will see a total of 370 athletes from Canada, the nation’s largest delegation since 1984.
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Marco Balich, longtime opening ceremonies executive producer and now a senior advisor to the Tokyo ceremonies executive producer, told Reuters the event was scaled down to offer a “sobering” performance.
“We have to do our best to complete this unique and hopefully the only one of its kind Olympics,” he said.
“It will be a much more sobering ceremony. Nevertheless with beautiful Japanese aesthetics. Very Japanese but also in sync with the sentiment of today, the reality.”
— with files from the Associated Press and Reuters
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