Protesters against the Games, on Friday, in Tokyo.KIMIMASA MAYAMA / EFE
While the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and the Japanese government multiply reassuring messages about the safe holding of the Tokyo 2020 Games as of next July 23, the events that do not stop, and have made their organization in an endless obstacle course, they seem bent on disproving his speech.
The Japanese government has invested about 12,000 million dollars, about 9,900 million euros (including the extra thousands of penalties for the delay) and cannot stop celebrating them, even if the income it receives is minimal, and it loses up to 3,300 million dollars (2,720 million euros) that it expects to receive from local sponsors and 800 million (660 million euros) from ticket sales.
Not counting the loss of income feared by bars, restaurants, museums, entertainment venues and tourist attractions, forbidden destinations for accredited foreigners, who will be forced to make their living exclusively in the Olympic facilities and their restaurants: stadiums, training centers. training, media centers ...
Losses are insured for the organizing country;
This is not the case for the IOC, whose economic survival, and that of the majority of international federations and national Olympic committees, depends on its celebration, even if behind closed doors, even by turning stadiums and pavilions into mere television studios and the Villa Olímpica, a regular place where thousands of athletes from 206 different countries and 33 specialties coexist, in a monastery with hot beds - a constant flow of entrances and exits will be organized in the Villa to avoid crowds - inhabited by masked people eating alone with two meters away from each other and without the right to even shake hands.
The image is the product that he has sold, and quite expensive, to televisions (Discovery paid 1,300 million euros) and to the sponsors of the TOP program, who secure a few hundred million more.
This is what Olympic magic, the quadrennial summit of the world's healthy youth, has been reduced to, to a question of numbers, to a problem of accounting.
The main challenge is logistical, and the small illustrated guides edited to inform about the health standards that the more than 11,000 athletes who have been preparing for the event for almost five years, and the almost as many thousands of journalists, leaders, technicians and assistants in accreditation routes, only offer a small sample of the logistical nightmare they must face.
The main ones will be the organization of the PCR tests, mandatory for everyone every four days and the Olympic transport network, since visitors will be prohibited from using public transport.
The guides advise all who arrive to be vaccinated, and the International Olympic Committee works so that it is not considered a privilege that Olympic athletes get vaccinated before other groups, since they have the consideration, granted by the UN, as ambassadors of their countries and symbols of a healthy society.
The vaccine will not be mandatory, but being immunized will not mean being able to avoid any of the obligations of hygiene, distance, mask and solitude.
And despite all the precautions, it is not impossible for the main nightmare to come true, that a positive, for example, in a player of a basketball team makes him obligatorily confine not only his team, but also his last rival.
A small number of positives can end up turning the competition into hopeless chaos.
