A year ago, when we were still allowed to gather in large groups from one Minion, activists called in Tokyo to talk about how they were going to end the biggest global gathering of them all – the Olympic Games. .
Activists came from all over the country: previous host cities such as Rio, London, Nagano and PyeongChang; Future host cities Paris and Los Angeles; Cities that managed to make their bids, including Boston and Hamburg; And places like Jakarta, which is slated for a 2032 bid.
He was in Tokyo, exactly one year before the scheduled start of the 2020 Summer Olympic Games, taking part in the first-ever anti-Olympic summit held in Tokyo by the unheard of Tokyo and formerly hangover group Hangrin Kai was conducted. Talked with activists, academics and members of the media about common sports-related issues such as displacement and police militarization, and discussed strategies to oppose local political forces and the IOC to protect their communities. Elsewhere in Tokyo, International Olympic Committee President Thomas Bak and the rest of the IOC team arrived to begin the countdown to the 365-day opening ceremony. Does the Mail Run on Labor Day
Eight months after these two very different celebrations in Tokyo, the IOC announced that the 2020 Olympics would be postponed for a full year due to the COVID-19 global epidemic. By the time he announced, most other sports tournaments planned for the summer had been canceled or postponed and athletes, many of whom had dropped out of training facilities due to the lockdown, were calling on the IOC to work more than a week . . Once the IOC made the officer indispensable, the athletes were able to reset and refocus their training on July 2021.
Also that 2021 will be a stripped-down version of the Games, with hardly any conclusion. The epidemic may not be under control until then. If so, and even if an effective vaccine against coronovirus is developed in time, the game may not occur. The postponement is likely to add billions to a budget that was triple before the original launch of the Tokyo bid that the IOC accepted in 2013. Public opinion in Japan is also seen swinging against the Games. In a recent survey, 77 percent of respondents said the Olympics could not be held next year. In another survey, a slim majority of Tokyo residents said the same thing.
The magnitude of the epidemic is real and widespread. Yet COVID-19 has given the Games an opportunity to derail – one that did not exist a few months ago and certainly did not exist when activists arrived in Tokyo last July. A professor of sports, gender and sexuality studies at Kansai University, Drs. Satoko Itani told me that the epidemic is a “powerful wake-up call” for those who would not have otherwise given an idea of the costs of the Olympics. . Does Canada Post Deliver on Labour Day
“Now that a lot of people in Japan are counting and monitoring the government's expenses to fight the epidemic, it has actually become ever clearer that with the taxpayers' money we have made the TOCOG [Tokyo Organizing Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games ] Was allowed and the government to spend two weeks on sports spectacles, while we do not have enough money to equip ‘essential workers' with the necessary safety gear, “he wrote in an email.
Also that 2021 will be a stripped-down version of the Games, with hardly any conclusion.
The postponement of the Games is taking place not only against the backdrop of a global epidemic, but also a global uprising against state-sanctioned killings of black people by the police. The catalyst for this movement was the assassination of George Floyd in Minneapolis by Derek Chauvin, but protests quickly spread beyond the Twin Cities to the rest of the US and then spread worldwide, including Japan.
Epidemics, police brutality, and unrelated incidents of the Olympics are not. Although COVID-19 may be a virus incapable of racial prejudice, the course has taken through America's population, changing its way through black, Latinex, and impoverished communities, decades of racist policy and discrimination Was determined from. American police forces have murdered black people for decades as part of the same system that allowed more African Americans to die than COVID-19 than any other group. It is also the system that has allowed the Olympic Games in the post-war period to re-organize the cities that rarely host the event for the benefit of all citizens. Displacement in the Games, police militarization, increased surveillance and violence against the working class and especially black and brown people has been a driving force behind the cities they have touched. The very groups that the epidemic has killed untimely and that the police dislike target those who become victims rather than beneficiaries of the Olympics.
