The Surprising Relief of the Tokyo Olympics – The New Yorker

Whether the Olympic Gameswould, could, and, above all, should take place this year was a problem that preoccupied everyone from virologists toheptathletes. The emergence of COVID-19 prevented Tokyo from hosting theGames in 2020. A year on, with the virus continuing to spread, even the host nation was unconvinced. According to a poll conducted in May, eighty-three per cent of the Japanese public believed that the Olympics should not go ahead, and enthusiasm in the wider world had barely progressed beyond the featherweight. With so many fears at large, how could we be expected to worry about rhythmic gymnastics? Or dressage, which is rhythmic gymnastics plus horses? Who cares about mens badminton?

The answer to that last question turned out to be Viktor Axelsen, the Dane who dethroned Chen Long, of Chinathe defending championin straight sets, and wept for joy. Sightings of untrammelled happiness have been rare in the past eighteen months; we have grown all too accustomed to the opposite. Rightly or wrongly, the Olympics did proceed, and, to general astonishment, began to work their weird, if slightly shopworn, magic. This may not have been evident in the opening ceremony, which felt hollowed out by the dearth of spectators, but, once the sporting frenzy began, competitors displayed a formidable knack for blotting out their surroundings and knuckling down to their tasks. Somehow, even without your parents screaming helpfully from thirty yards away, you pick up your pole and vault.

Unless youre the American vaulter Sam Kendricks, in which case you pack up your poles and go home. On July29th, Kendricks tested positive for COVID. His Games were over before they had started, and his absence could be sensed in the contest; we were left to imagine the battle that he might have enjoyed with Mondo Duplantis, a Swede with the demeanor of a Disney prince and the name of a tropical night club. In the end, what we got was Duplantis versus himself, seeking to clear the bar at an unprecedented height of six metres nineteen centimetres, a pinch beyond the world record, and failing by the merest graze of a thigh.

How often the Games reveal such lonely eminence. Even at this peak of proficiency, some people leave their rivals far behind. Mijan Lpez, the great Greco-Roman wrestler from Cuba, calmly acquired his fourth Olympic gold at Tokyo; it must be chastening, as a fellow-wrestler, to know for sure that, however hard you train, youll always wind up bent double, with Lpez athwart you and your nose against the mat. In the pool, the swimmers Caeleb Dressel, of the United States, and Emma McKeon, of Australia, won a dozen medals between them, thus proving that they are, to all intents and purposes, porpoises. The lanky empress of the triple jump, Venezuelas Yulimar Rojas, demolished a record that had stood since 1995, and Karsten Warholm, the Norwegian four-hundred-metre hurdler, outstripped his own world record by so absurd a distance that he rejoiced by ripping open his vest. So Warholm can be beaten, but only by a dose of Kryptonite.

Some of the winning margins, on the track, merited not suspicion but complaint. Fingers were pointed at the latest footwear. Before the Games, Usain Bolt remarked, We are really adjusting the spikes to a level where its now giving athletes an advantage to run even faster. Two points need to be made. First, the only technology-assisted way to beat Bolts records, in the one hundred and two hundred metres, is to write to the Acme Company, as patronized by WileE.Coyote, and order those shoes with the giant springs. And, second, spikiness per se is no guarantee. Whereas the U.S. female runnersSydney McLaughlin and Dalilah Muhammad especially, who took gold and silver in the four-hundred-metre hurdleswere in spirited form, their male counterparts, however well shod, had a Games to forget. They came away goldless, and the sprint-relay team languished in the semifinal behind China, Canada, Italy, Germany, and Ghana. The American guys may not have dropped the baton, butthey lost the plot.

Yet the Tokyo Olympics, though menaced by a gruelling degree of heat and humidity, did offer surprising relief. And all because of the kids. So many gazes, understandably, were riveted on Simone Biles that when, to her credit, she nerved herself to compete on the beam and came in third, scant attention was paid to Chinas Guan Chenchen, who beat her to the gold. Guan is sixteen. In everything from schooling to social interaction, the past year and a half has been ruinous for young people, and the Games became an opportunity for a bunch of themthe lucky ones, loaded with freakish talentto exact revenge for the near-imprisonment of a generation. Whats more, they made the fight back look like fun.

Nowhere was that joy more frankly expressed than in the most recent disciplines. Fresh sports are frequentlyadded to the Olympic schedule, the rule being that, after expressing grave reservations about the new event, you then see it in action, get instantly addicted, and wonder how the Games ever managed without it. This year, the dbutants included skateboarding, surfing, BMX freestyle, and sport climbing, which demands three separate skills: Speed, Bouldering, and Lead. (Prizes are awarded to viewers at home for pretending tomaster the jargon.) The victorious climberwas an eighteen-year-old Spaniard, Alberto Gins Lpez. The loser was gravity, and a similar suspension of natural law was visible among the skateboarders, who dwell in a haze of dudeish fellowship where age has no dominion. The silver and bronze medallists in the Womens Park were, respectively, twelve and thirteen. The highest-placed American was Bryce Wettstein, a grizzled veteran of seventeen. She was praised by one commentator for her timeless backside ollie, which would have made Stan Laurel scratch his head.

Only a fool would argue that the world of the pandemic, of fire and flood, and of economic uncertainty was halted or healed by this years Olympic Games. Only a cynic, however, would deny that, for a fortnight, the darkness was put on hold. Faith in the future was restored by the sight of Athing Mu, aged nineteen, who was born and raised in Trenton, New Jersey, whose parents emigrated from Sudan, and whose long, commanding stride brought her a gold medal and a new U.S. record in the eight hundred metres. Afterward, she tweeted her reaction: Lol, I think its funny that we literally run so fast and just stop once we get to the line. Why stop, then? Mu could teach us something. She could run and run.

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The Surprising Relief of the Tokyo Olympics - The New Yorker