Icon: enlarge
The Olympic flame has arrived in Japan
Photo: Eugene Hoshiko / AP / dpa
The Olympic Games in Tokyo will now take place without foreign spectators.
The Japanese hosts' decision is another setback for this week's games.
In the past few days there had been excitement in athletics and fencing when even the most well-intentioned protocols proved overwhelmed by the pandemic.
Numerous corona cases in Budapest and Torun at international events raised ever increasing doubts as to whether it could all work this way in summer: A sporting event that brings thousands of people from all over the world together in the pandemic.
It can really only go wrong, right?
And what should you want that for at all?
There will be no such thing as a boisterous celebration of sport, sealed off from the world.
Even many athletes are now torn.
On the one hand, they want their possible career culmination.
On the other hand, there is a health risk for themselves and for others, the extent of which - keyword long-term damage - cannot be foreseen for a long time.
It was not only this week that it became clear that hygiene concepts have their limits with all good will.
All these bubbles are ultimately an illusion and permeable somewhere.
The one in Tokyo is also many times larger when over 10,000 athletes plus supervisors and officials, perhaps also journalists from all over the world, come together.
But the IOC has repeatedly ruled out another postponement or cancellation of Olympia.
There is no plan B, said Thomas Bach.
The IOC only seems to be committed to its own coffers.
The Olympic spirit, which Bach also invoked time and again, was concerned with sport and its athletes.
Towards them, the IOC is at least moral in its duty of care like an employer is to its employees.
It also earns a lot per cycle from its sporting performance, in Sochi 2014 and Rio 2016 alone it was over three billion TV monies.
But some athletes consider the so-called playbook presented so far with the rules for the games to be far from sufficient.
Now there are still four months until the planned opening ceremony.
There is still time for improvement, which is urgently required - in everyone's interest.
Serious illnesses or even deaths of athletes that are directly associated with the Olympics, even the otherwise morally not squeamish IOC can hardly want.
Cynically speaking, they are likely to be even more damaging to the reputation of the core product, which recently continued to achieve new revenue records, than friendships and business relationships with autocrats and human rights violators.
It's time for the IOC to talk about a Plan B: not in back rooms, but in public.
Also to take the fear and pressure off athletes.
The constant talk about the lack of alternatives to the games in summer is already leading to uncontrolled collateral damage, as in Budapest and Torun, the scope of which cannot be foreseen.
If you want to be there in Tokyo, you have to qualify internationally and gain competitive experience.
This is not without risk in the pandemic.
The IOC should plan together with the athletes
Most athletes don't want to cancel the games either.
If the IOC takes on responsibility, it can only be another postponement or radical adjustment.
There will probably not be a rejection just out of business interests.
You have to be realistic: Contagions cannot be ruled out as long as the games are taking place.
A superspreader event with unforeseeable consequences must be prevented in any case if the tens of thousands are not to carry the virus back to a non-immunized world when they leave.
That is the least.
So what could the Olympics look like?
An opening ceremony with all teams, also mutual visits and thus the mixing of the athletes with each other are hardly imaginable.
Instead, one would have to separate sports from one another instead of bringing them together in the common Olympic village.
For the athletes, all this would take away a lot of the real fascination of the Olympics, the togetherness and confusion of sports and nations.
Either way: the IOC has to worry.
It should do it publicly and together with the athletes who end up bearing the consequences.
Otherwise, the damage to his expensive product could end up being much greater than just the loss of the Tokyo Summer Games.
Icon: The mirror
