Now they are disappearing again from the public’s light: the keirin drivers, the kata exercises in karate, the piaffes in the dressage arena.
Carsten Sostmeier’s ingratiating reporter’s voice will be heard less often again, and ARD table tennis whisperer Frank Grundhever is also behind his 15 minutes of celebrity.
The Tokyo Olympics are over, and IOC boss Thomas Bach, as usual, summed up what a wonderful two weeks it had been.
The Tokyo Games exceeded all his expectations, Bach celebrated at the end, but that is what Bach always says, regardless of whether the Games took place in authoritarian Russia, in financially troubled Brazil or in the Corona hotspot Tokyo.
Perhaps, however, the top Olympian’s expectations were so low that the Games in Japan did not find it difficult to cross the bar of the IOC chief. When it comes to fine-tuning, Bach earns gold every time.
In any case, they were special games, Tokyo 2021 will keep its own place in Olympic history, but one shouldn’t be very proud of it.
The Summer Olympics have never been such television games, the audience was locked out, the people in Tokyo stood around the Olympic Stadium and watched as the few accredited journalists, the officials, got access to the competitions. In the stadium, the seats were colored to suggest that there was life there. The perfect illusion.
Also possible on Mars
Logically, these were games without any flair, the triumphs and tragedies that every Olympic tournament brings with it, they only took place in front of the TV cameras. Above all, that was a shame for the athletes who had to celebrate their successes for themselves. Presumably the Games could have taken place on Mars too, that wouldn’t have made a huge difference.
The athletes themselves have never been so challenged to create atmosphere and enthusiasm. Some of them succeeded, the Australian swimmer Emma McKeon and her US colleague Caeleb Dressel, the decathlon king Damian Warner. And again it was above all the surprising successes that touched people in front of the screen: Aline Rotter-Focken’s ringer gold, Jonathan Hilbert, the walker crying with joy over his silver. The shared gold in the high jump moved people. Those were the cherry blossoms in everyday Olympic life.
Other best performances left more questions: a few records in athletics were too many to simply celebrate them away. It is well known that Corona has also made it more difficult to control doping.
The empty space in front of the stage
From a sporting point of view, however, the Olympic Games were exciting and touching, once again, the Olympics still manage that, the sport itself is big enough for it. But it has never been made so difficult for him.
The largest sports festival in the world had no guests, the space in front of the stage was empty. Athletes in particular who have the unique chance to soak up the atmosphere of such games only every four years must have felt cheated in the end. Tennis professional and Olympic champion Alexander Zverev is cheered by the masses everywhere, but canoeist Ricarda Funk only at the Olympics.
The IOC absolutely and absolutely wanted these games, in the end Bach can say: Everything went well.
He could ask the professional cyclist Simon Geschke, who sat in quarantine in Tokyo for ten days in a hotel and then left in frustration, or the golf stars Jon Rahm and Bryson DeChambeau, who missed the gold dream because of Corona as did pole vault world champion Sam Kendricks.
Bach would probably say with a shrug of his shoulders that these were unfortunate individual cases, illnesses and injuries were just a part of it.
What apparently also belongs to it: that a sprinter from Belarus should be forced by her association against her will to return home. The drama about Kristina Timanowskaja tore the veil off the Olympic facade of the true, the beautiful and the good. Unsurprisingly, the IOC had to be carried to hunt.
No, once again there weren’t any unadulterated, cheerful games. It doesn’t have to be like that, after all, the Olympics still take place in reality. Even if the IOC would still prefer to lock out the outside world.
The IOC has rejected the motion to suspend the games to commemorate the atomic bombing on Hiroshima on August 6th.