And the crowd goes … silent? How no cheering could impact Olympic performance

Former U.S. Olympic swimmer Tara Kirk Sell was in Russia to compete in the World Cup swimming circuit in 2006 and remembers the Moscow crowd’s reaction when her name was announced just before she dove into the pool.

“It was dead silent,” Kirk Sell said.

Athletes taking part in the Tokyo Olympics this year are also likely to hear crickets when they compete because the Japanese organizers and the International Olympic Committee, concerned about containing the pandemic, are limiting the number of spectators to no more than 10,000 in the venues.

The smaller-than-usual crowds will be almost entirely Japanese, and they won’t be allowed to cheer or sing or chant, because that’s one way of spreading the coronavirus.

How athletes from around the world will react to not having somebody in the stands cheering them on remains to be seen. But Kirk Sell, who won a silver medal for the U.S. at the Athens Games in 2004 and is now a professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, said she suspects most of the Olympic athletes are psychologically up for the challenge.

“My initial thoughts are that the lack of fans will be weird for some of the athletes, but at the same time, many of them likely have competed in similar circumstances before, albeit not at that level,” Kirk Sell said. “When I did the World Cup circuit in swimming, it drew a large number of international swimmers. But the crowd was almost entirely domestic.”