LAST WORD
The rescheduled Summer Olympics, delayed from 2020, were intended to be held in a world that had brought the pandemic under control. When they were postponed, there was an optimism that Tokyo 2020 would go ahead in some kind of relative ‘normality’. Of course, that’s not the case. The western world is a shifting mess of lockdowns, vaccination programmes, third, fourth and fifth waves of variant viruses, quarantine procedures, strained public health systems, torpid economies and all the rest that COVID-19 has dragged along with it.
The Olympics ultimately relies on certainty; it works only because it doesn’t move on the calendar. You can’t delay it for a couple of days while you fix a few things. It’s a performance of logistics on a titanic scale. If one aspect of it is not on track, the only solution is to throw immense amounts of resources at it until it is.
