Olympic Games Begin

“The Tokyo Olympics Opening Ceremony will take place at 8 p.m. local time in Japan on Friday, July 23.” NBC Sports

Many on both sides criticize the Japanese government and the IOC, and wonder whether the games should have been delayed or canceled:

“The Tokyo Olympic fiasco didn’t start with the coronavirus pandemic. When Tokyo was elevated from candidate city to host, the two bid architects, Japan Olympic Committee President Tsunekazu Takeda and Masato Mizuno, chairman of the global Mizuno Sports Equipment Co., were jettisoned for political reasons. Their replacements, politicians Yoshiro Mori and Toshiro Muto, were neither sportsmen nor businessmen. So when the pandemic forced a one-year postponement of Tokyo 2020, there was no one capable of gathering the reins and salvaging the Olympics…

“While Israel was buying up enough vaccines to return to normalcy, Tokyo 2020, in step with the International Olympic Committee and fighting to preserve its brand, was instead concocting a series of ‘Playbooks’ whose goal was to protect unvaccinated Japanese from foreign Olympic participants, most of whom would be vaccinated… An official at the Japanese Embassy in Washington summed up the entire control effort up in 10 words: ‘Lack of information. Lack of instructions. Confusing information. Confusing instructions.’”
(Jonathan Kolatch, Wall Street Journal)