A few games in suspense

The emptiness of the 68,000 seats of the Tokyo stadium will be the eloquent soundtrack of the new dimension into which the strangest and most complex Olympic Games in history enter.

The flame will ignite this Friday (La 1 and Eurosport, 1:00 p.m.) in the cauldron while the pandemic continues to plague the world and citizens remain on alert.

The appointment comes a year later than planned, an unprecedented postponement in a 125-year history that only includes the cancellations of 1916, 1940 and 1944 due to the world wars that shook the last century.

Restlessness and uncertainty now hang over the event that was postponed 18 months ago and that the International Olympic Committee (IOC) has resisted canceling.

With the facts already accomplished, the president of the IOC, Thomas Bach, has admitted what everyone sensed and he and his collaborators kept silent.

“There were doubts every day, and many sleepless nights.

Like the rest of the people around the world, we did not know what tomorrow was going to bring, ”he said Wednesday in Tokyo during the 138th plenary session of the IOC.

More information

• Brisbane to host 2032 Olympics

• The great olympic bubble

The conclave of the best athletes in the world is already a reality despite the skepticism of many citizens, especially the Japanese, before an event that brings together 11,274 athletes, 5,392 women and 5,882 men, representing more than 200 countries, precisely what contraindicate experts in the fight against the pandemic.

The leaders of the IOC, encouraged, they say, by their mission to provide all means for the sake of competition, have endeavored to imbue these Games with a redemptive meaning, "the light at the end of the tunnel, the triumph of humanity" , as the Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe emphasized at the time of the postponement.

Bach has been encouraged to add an adverb to the Olympic motto of Baron de Coubertin: “Citius, altius, fortius… communis” (Faster, higher, stronger… more united).

But nobody escapes that the IOC needs to avoid the magnitude of the economic disaster, already inevitable due to the delay and aggravated by the decision adopted this month to definitively not allow any spectators to attend. The Games, without the colors and the spirit of the stands, will be something else; and televisions, more than ever, the only eye through which everything is seen. But canceling the most expensive Games in history, with a budget of 13,430 million euros, would have cost 11,500 million. And the price of the postponement, according to an estimate by Professor Emeritus Katsuhiro Miyamoto of Kansai University, will be $ 5 billion.

The effort of the organizers to configure safe Games has been and is enormous.

The prestige of the IOC and the sport is at stake, more than ever, and under the scrutiny of the whole world.

The rules established to preserve athletes and the Olympic family are exhaustive.

The coexistence of so many thousands of people and of such diverse origins makes an impenetrable bubble little less than impossible.

In fact, there have already been several dozen positives for covid in the Olympic facilities.

The Games will be in suspense, pending that the drip does not increase and may affect the athletes and the competition.

Biles, Dressel and the new stars

The rarest and most out-of-the-ordinary Games can further underscore their role in inspiring and transforming the world. The figures called to dominate in Tokyo will have the opportunity to reinforce the message they send with their performances on the courts, in the swimming pools, wherever they compete. Tokyo, the reigns of Michael Phelps and Usain Bolt, the two mega stars of the last five decades, have already reserved the crown for Simone Biles. The prodigious 24-year-old American gymnast has pledged herself to achieve the "unimaginable." He won five medals at Rio 2016, four gold. She promises and fans look forward to sublime moments. Caeleb Dressel is called to be the successor of Phelps, although he will not be able to match his compatriot's eight golds in Beijing 2008 because in Tokyo he will line up in six tests. Florida swimmer, about to turn 25,He has already shown his quality in the last two World Cups in which he has accumulated 13 titles. The Tokyo Aquatic Center is also expecting a lot from the duel between American Katie Ledecky and Australian Ariarne Titmus.

A tough task is guessed for the United States men's basketball team, captained by Kevin Durant, who may be stalked again, among others, the Spanish team in the last dance of Pau Gasol at 41 years of age. The tournament will be encouraged by Luka Doncic, who qualified the Slovenian team with an impressive performance. The Swedish Armand Duplantis in the pole vault, the Venezuelan Yulimar Rojas in the triple jump and the Jamaican sprinter Shelly-Ann Fraser-Price are some of the attractions in athletics. In the absence of Rafa Nadal and Roger Federer, Novak Djokovic is the head of the poster in tennis, where the game and the words of the Japanese Naomi Osaka are awaited with expectation.

The IOC has opted for the incorporation of four new sports, karate, climbing, surfing and skateboarding.

Baseball and softball are also making a comeback, and the Olympic program goes from 28 sports in Rio to 33 in Tokyo.

The opening ceremony, in which half of the athletes will parade due to the pandemic, has been punctuated by the latest of the incidents that have occurred during the organization of the Games.

Kentaro Kobayashi, one of its artistic directors, resigned yesterday after protests over a series of jokes about the Holocaust in the 1990s.

Tokyo already hosted the Games in 1964. Then, the last torch relay was given by the 19-year-old athlete Yoshinori Sakai, nicknamed the baby of Hiroshima for being born the same day the United States dropped the atomic bomb on the city. Japanese. The Tokyo press is considering the possibility that the last reliever is now an athlete related to some of the latest catastrophes that Japan has suffered such as the natural disaster and the Fukushima nuclear crisis in 2011. The initial intention to promote the event would thus be maintained like the Reconstruction Games, later overshadowed by the Pandemic Games. The motto of the ceremony is "United by emotion."

The IOC has given the possibility that, for the first time, each country has two flag bearers.

Saúl Craviotto and Mireia Belmonte will carry the flag of the Spanish delegation made up of 321 athletes, 184 men and 137 women.

Spain obtained 17 medals in Rio and its top is still the 22 that it reached in Barcelona 92. Nine team selections that have been on the podium of the last World Cups or Europeans, and established figures such as Craviotto, Mireia, Orlando Ortega and Lydia Valentín, as well as new recruits such as Jon Rahm, Nikoloz Sherazadishvili, Adriana Cerezo and Mohamed Katir support the confidence of the Spanish delegation in the strangest Games in history.

The IOC rectifies after banning images of anti-racist protests

The IOC and the Tokyo 2020 organizers rectified their decision to ban their social media teams from posting images of athletes' protest gestures. Members of the women's soccer teams of Chile, Great Britain, the United States, Sweden and New Zealand dropped to one knee, the gesture used to protest against racism, on Wednesday before the first matches of the tournament. According to the Guardian, IOC officials prevented the dissemination of the images.

Rule 50 of the Olympic Charter prohibits any form of protest by athletes on the premises, but the IOC this month approved a modification in an attempt to reconcile the application of the rule while at the same time recognizing, and sometimes praising, images of protest like those of sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos raising their fists with black gloves on the podium in Mexico 1968.

Subscribe here

to our special newsletter about the Tokyo Games