What we’re witnessing right now play out in Tokyo is unparalleled in the political history of the Olympics. And you’re pointing the finger in the right direction, when we think about the International Olympic Committee. The saga in Tokyo has exposed an International Olympic Committee that openly disrespects the will of locals, that brushes off inconvenient facts from experts, like medical experts, who have long been saying these games are a terrible idea. And the IOC tends to prioritize its profits over all else.
Meanwhile, the Olympics tend to kneecap democracy, undercut democracy, in ways that you describe, with the very prime minister essentially reduced to a contractual supplicant to the International Olympic Committee, with no power to decide whether to cancel or not. And you’re seeing also that everything is very vulnerable to things like COVID-19 and also, I think, climate change. So, when the International Olympic Committee arrives in the host city, it’s this parastate-type organization. But what we’ve seen time and time again, and now in Technicolor in Tokyo, is that it’s also a parasite on the host city.
Tokyo 2020 has actually been a cascade of calamities from the beginning. If we go back to 2013, when Tokyo was initially awarded the games by the International Olympic Committee, then-Prime Minister Shinzo Abe stood in front of the International Olympic Committee and said that, in Fukushima, things were “under control.” This is part of the double lie that’s the foundation of the Tokyo Olympics. If you are a self-respecting biologist or scientist in Fukushima at that time, in 2013, you knew things were very much not under control. After all, the triple-whammy earthquake, tsunami and nuclear meltdown of March 2011 was still playing out in the prefecture. So that was the first lie.
The second lie is that they started to call these Olympics the, quote-unquote, “recovery games,” arguing that by hosting the Olympics, it would actually help Fukushima and the other affected regions recover from
— source democracynow.org | Jul 23, 2021