--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Support for Today Explained comes from the FIFA World Cup, of all things. The FIFA World Cup 26 is coming to North America next summer. It is the ultimate celebration of sports and culture. You can get closer to the beautiful game with a hospitality package, closer to the action, the best seats, the best suites, closer to match day and that world-class food and that world-class entertainment, closer to the experience of a lifetime. Book a hospitality package at fifaworldcup.com slash hospitality.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Have you seen Akira? It's this sort of iconic movie from 1988. Wikipedia calls it a Japanese animated post-apocalyptic cyberpunk action film. It takes place in a dystopian, futuristic Tokyo. In one early scene, you see a sign advertising the upcoming 2020 Tokyo Olympics, as in this movie accidentally predicted where the 2020 Olympics would land, except for, you know, what happened in 2020.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But it gets even more interesting in the movie that 2020 Tokyo Olympics billboard has some graffiti underneath it and it reads chushi da chushi meaning just stop it or just cancel it and that too mirrors real life since the start of the pandemic people in Tokyo have been protesting the Olympics saying chushida chushi just stop it
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So it appears that the Tokyo Olympics are going to press ahead, even though we are in the midst of a serious global health pandemic. Jules Boykoff, he's a professor of political science at Pacific University in Oregon. He represented the U.S. Olympic soccer team in international competition, and he's really into the Olympics. Author of four books on the Olympics, maybe? We checked. He's definitely written four books about the Olympics, and he's been following the Tokyo Games closely.
--:-- Jules Boykoff: And for me, it's a chance to slow down and think about the Olympics more generally. A lot of what we're seeing in Tokyo is actually not necessarily Tokyo problems, but they're Olympic problems that get imported into each and every host city. It just happens to be Tokyo in this case and under pandemic conditions.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And the pandemic continues to be a real source of tension around these games. With the Tokyo Olympics just over 10 weeks away, IOC President Thomas Bach canceling a planned trip to Japan, citing the surge of COVID-19 cases there, with a state of emergency recently extended in several parts of the country.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The Olympics are experiencing major mayhem right now. Medical officials in Japan and across the world are clamoring for the Olympics to be canceled. Meanwhile, the International Olympic Committee and local Tokyo organizers are saying that the Games will in fact go on in Japan, where cases are surging, where they're in the midst of their fourth wave. Less than 2% of the population is fully vaccinated.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And the buildup continues to be dominated by two questions. Will they go ahead and should they go ahead? There's a lot of pushback in Japan as well as around the world from medical professionals, scientists, and even some athletes are starting to wonder aloud whether it's right to push ahead with the Olympics.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Tennis star Naomi Osaka represents Japan. Here's what she said when asked whether it was appropriate for the Games to go ahead. For me, I'm an athlete. And of course, my immediate thought is that I'd want to play the Olympics. But as a human, I would say we're in a pandemic. And if people aren't healthy and if they're not feeling safe, then it's definitely a really big cause for concern.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: At the end of the day, this is all about the athletes. How are the IOC and Tokyo planning on keeping them safe? Is it one big bubble, a bunch of small bubbles? They're still working out how they're going to do their bubble system. But no matter how you slice it, it's sort of going to be like one El Bubble Grande because there's 11,000 athletes that are going to be coming in.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You're going to have to figure out a way. There's been a lot of concern from athletes as to how they will be housed. Will they be housed by sport? That way, if there's a breakout of COVID, one sport could be sacrificed and maybe have that canceled for these Olympics, as sad as that would be for those athletes.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: One other thing, they are limiting the amount of people that they're going to allow into the country. Previously, there was supposed to be in the neighborhood of 180,000 people, officials that would come into Japan for these Olympics. Tokyo organizers have announced that instead of 180,000, it'll be more like 90,000 or fewer.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So for some, that is comfort. For others, they're like, what? 90,000 people? And that does not include the athletes, which is about 11,000 for the Olympics, 15,000 when you include the Paralympics. And so tens of thousands of people will be coming into the country.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: They have measures in place, such as not using the public transportation system if you're an athlete, trying to buy your meals takeaway instead of going into restaurants, and basically staying within the confines of the Olympic Village, having testing all the time, every single day, and those sort of measures that are designed to make it a safer space for Olympians than everybody else in Japan.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And we know people in Tokyo are protesting these games. Do we have any idea how many people are for or against them? Well, back when Japan won the Olympics in 2013 from the International Olympic Committee, they were popular. The games of the 32nd Olympiad in 2020 are awarded to the city of... Tokyo!
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But over time, they've become less so with the spending that has happened. Originally, the Olympics were supposed to cost $7.3 billion, and instead they're costing more like $30 billion. And so slowly over time, support has eroded.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But really the thing that chipped away the most support for these Olympics among the general population in Japan is the rise of the coronavirus Around 60 of the population in Japan prefers full cancellation of the Olympics.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Let's move on. We've sunk our costs, we've spent our money, and we're willing to take the losses and move on to a safer day. Wow. So the majority of people in Japan would prefer, they just take the L, so to speak, has the IOC commented specifically on the fact that the majority of the people in Japan don't actually want these games to take place this summer?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You know, they have, actually. There was one of the spokespeople for the International Olympic Committee, a gentleman by the name of Mark Adams. As with all organizations, we have to pay attention to public opinion, but not be totally driven by it. And I'm sure you can imagine how that went over in Japan.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: What do you think is keeping the IOC sort of committed to this line that they've drawn in the sand here that, you know, they're going to hold these games in the summer of 2021 come hell or pandemic?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yeah, I mean, I'm only being a little facetious when I say there are three reasons, money, money, and money. And it's important for us to note that More than 90% of the International Olympic Committee's revenues are derived from two sources, broadcasting revenues as well as corporate sponsorship revenues.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 73% of the IOC's revenue come from broadcasters, big-time broadcasters like NBC and smaller ones around the world that pay for the rights to broadcast the games. The striking vista of Copacabana Beach on a Friday evening in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Another 18% comes from corporate sponsors like Coca-Cola, Alibaba, Panasonic, and other big behemoth corporations.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Where you see a little bit of friction is between the Japanese organizers and the International Olympic Committee when it comes to whether there should be fans in the stands. They've already said that overseas spectators will not be allowed to enter the country and attend the Olympics. But still an open question as to whether they're going to allow people in Japan to attend the games.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Why it's a little bit frictive between those two groups, the International Olympic Committee and the local Tokyo organizers, is because this was supposed to be a big source of revenue for the local organizing committee. Around $800 million was supposed to go to the local organizers.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And so, yeah, money really talks. And I think that's a good place to start to understand why we're trying to push ahead or why the International Olympic Committee is trying to push ahead with an Olympics in the midst of a global health pandemic.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Apart from the money, is there a certain sense of pride on the line here for the city, for the Games, for the IOC?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: There's definitely some pride within Japan, people I've spoken with there, who would be proud to pull off this major, complicated, audaciously impractical event in the midst of a pandemic.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And also, I think it's important to note the geopolitical factors involved here. Less than nine months down the road, Beijing is slated to host the 2022 Winter Olympics. And being somewhat of a geopolitical adversary to Japan, that gives Japan a little bit of extra incentive to try to pull these games off, not just hand the torch right over to their geopolitical foe.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Quick break then we'll talk about the geopolitics of the Olympics
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So Jules, a funny thing about these Tokyo Olympic Games is that less than six months after they end, we'll get another Olympic Games?
--:-- Jules Boykoff: Yeah, that's what it seems like. Less than nine months away, we have the Beijing Winter 2022 Games on the docket, opening in early February 2022.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And Beijing has a somewhat complicated history with the Olympics.
--:-- Jules Boykoff: Oh, absolutely. Human rights observers are up in arms over the fact that China has been persecuting ethnic Uyghurs. Not one, not some, but every single provision in the United Nations Genocide Convention violated by the Chinese government's treatment of Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: There's the long-standing issue of Tibet. There's evidence that Beijing is forcing hundreds of thousands of Tibetans off their land and into so-called vocational training centres that are set to resemble labour camps.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: There's the recent crushing of dissent in Hong Kong. This morning, anti-government protests in Hong Kong reaching a new level of violence, as police now say they arrested over 260 people in just one day, most as students.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So this has been a longstanding issue. And when in 2001, Beijing was attempting to persuade the International Olympic Committee to allow them to host the 2008 Summer Olympics they said at the time the leaders of the bid and people in China that hosting the Games would jumpstart democracy It would be a human rights heyday for the country
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But unfortunately, nothing of the sort has transpired. And so you have all these human rights groups that are up in arms calling for various types of boycotts.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: For example, one set of about 180 human rights organizations called for a diplomatic boycott of the Beijing Olympics. So you won't send diplomats there. There's another version that asks athletes to boycott the Olympics.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Just this week, there was another set of human rights groups that have argued that we should just have a full-on boycott, including athletes, including diplomats, including everything.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Because people who study mega events and sport mega events have pointed to this phenomenon called sports washing, where a country who is a human rights violator uses the Olympic Games to make themselves look important, make themselves look like a typical member of the international community by hosting a big mega event, by standing in front of the cameras, by announcing the games.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And so there's been a lot of pushback against this notion of sports washing as a way of sort of brushing these human rights violations under the historical rug.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So sports washing allows countries to sort of brush aside their politics, their abuses, because people get wrapped up in the games. What's the reality? What's happening off camera when a country lands the Olympics?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Basically, there are four major trends that have emerged when it comes to the Olympics that apply to all the Olympics that happen in varying degrees. So you have overspending, You have the militarization of public space. You have gentrification and forced eviction.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And you also have greenwashing, talking a big green game, but then not following through with your environmental promises.
--:-- Jules Boykoff: Tell me a bit more about each of those, starting with overspending.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Projected costs for the entire Olympics have ballooned by about twice that of the original amount bid, according to certain estimates.
--:-- Jules Boykoff: And that has some people asking, is it worth it? The Tokyo Olympics were supposed to cost $7.3 billion, and they're going to cost more like $30 billion.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But it's not Tokyo alone. The previous Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea, doubled the amount that they were supposed to spend.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: There was the Sochi Olympics, which was supposed to cost $12 billion, but ended up costing $51 billion.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So you get the picture. It doesn't matter where the Olympics happen. There's cost overruns.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And the second was that this militarization of public places?
--:-- Jules Boykoff: This is an ITN newsflash from the Olympic village in Munich, where early this morning, armed Palestinian guerrillas raided the sleeping quarters of the Israeli team.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The gunmen shot dead two Israelis and are now holding 20 athletes and six officials as hostages.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Because the Olympics have become so big, they've actually been a terrorist target.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And of course, after the September 11th attacks, security has become a huge issue around the Olympics.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The thing is, the security forces in the host country essentially use the Olympic Games like their own private cash machine, getting all the special weapons and laws that they'd never be able to get during normal political times.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And in fact, when a host city agrees to host the Olympics, the national legislature must pass a law that harmonizes the local laws with the IOC dictates, the International Olympic Committee dictates.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So what we're seeing in Tokyo, for example, is they passed a law in 2017 that enhanced the surveillance powers of the government in ways that were horrifying to human rights observers in terms of free thinking and having private space.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: They're also going to use facial recognition systems at every single venue in Tokyo, even though they are proven to be racially biased.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And what you see a lot of times at the Olympics is they bring in new equipment and technologies, laws that become the new normal for everyday policing afterwards.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And what we also see is that when terrorists don't show up, and of course we don't want them to show up at the Olympics, those same devices, weapons, laws are there to use against protesters who are expressing their displeasure with various elements of the Olympics or society more generally.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Tell me more about forced evictions.
--:-- Jules Boykoff: Another home is turned to rubble and dust. In years to come, the demolition men of Beijing will look back on this as their golden age.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But many local people remember it as the time that Beijing sold its soul.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: When Beijing hosted the Olympics in 2008, 1.5 million people were displaced to make way for the Olympic venues and games.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 1.5 million. Same for South Korea that hosted the Olympics in 1988 in Seoul. More than 700,000 people were displaced for those games.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You also see a whole lot of gentrification where the so-called revitalization of the areas around the Olympics means that people who used to live there can no longer afford to do so anymore.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So take the 2012 London Olympics. The five boroughs around the Olympic area were massively gentrified.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And a lot of people who'd been living there, their families for generations, were forced to move because of the higher prices that accrue because of the development around the Games.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And lastly, this sort of false promise of a greening Olympic afterglow or something like that?
--:-- Jules Boykoff: Greenwashing has become endemic to the Olympics. They're supposed to be the greenest, most sustainable Games ever.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But a quick look at the list of partners and sponsors for London 2012 tells a very different story.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The way the sponsors are chosen were the ones with the deepest wallets and the least consciences.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: This is basically an 11 billion pound public taxpayer funded advertising campaign for some of the worst corporate criminals in our world today.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The people at the International Olympic Committee talk a big green game, but follow through is almost always lacking.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I lived in Rio de Janeiro in 2015. I was a Fulbright Research Fellow there in the lead up to the Olympics.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Then I was there also living there for the Olympics themselves.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And I saw and talked to many people who were very excited about the promise that Olympic organizers were bringing to the people of Rio that they were going to clean up this place called Guanabara Bay which where a lot of people go swimming or go around in their boats and where there were going to be Olympic events in the bid for the Rio games it was promised that 80% of the water that filtrated into Guanabara Bay was going to be cleaned and it was going to be a big upgrade a huge legacy, if you will, for the Olympic Games.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Unfortunately, by the time the Olympics rolled around, that did not happen.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And so I think that just stands in for the larger whole of greenwashing we're seeing in Tokyo, where they used the horrific triple whammy disaster in Fukushima, the earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear meltdown that happened in March 2011, as a sort of slogan for these Olympics.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: They've been called the recovery games. When you talk to people living in Fukushima and you ask them about the idea of recovery, their response is always the same. They politely laugh.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: As if hosting the Olympics was going to help jumpstart the recovery in the area.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Well I traveled to Fukushima in July 2019 and I talked to everyday people on the streets I talked to journalists there. I talked to elected officials.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And they were so mad about this recovery games slogan.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: They actually told me one person after the other that by hosting the Olympics in Tokyo, it actually diverted resources from the affected areas down near the nuclear facility that could have been used to help with recovery, but instead they were actually slower because of the Olympics.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So greenwashing is definitely something that's become normalized with the Olympics, and we can see it at work in Tokyo as well.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So you've got profligate spending, you've got militarization, gentrification, forced evictions, and environmental catastrophe.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Why do it at all?
--:-- Jules Boykoff: Yeah, well, I mean, I think it's worth pointing out, notwithstanding all those clear-cut trends that academics from around the world have been talking about now for at least the last decade, that the Olympics are actually quite popular still.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So long as they're not happening in your city, they're popular.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I mean, and that's, again, goes back to the athletes and how amazing the athletes are.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: In terms of what's happening in Tokyo, well, the shine is definitely worn off and they're ready to shrug off these games and move on, take their losses.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: What we're seeing globally is that more and more cities are no longer game to host the Olympic Games.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: This happened with many cities in Norway, in Switzerland, in Austria.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And they decided, nope, we don't want these Olympics.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And that only left two cities remaining. And that was Beijing and Almaty, Kazakhstan, neither of them exactly bastions of democracy.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And the International Olympic Committee went with the organization they knew in Beijing because they had hosted before.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And that's why Beijing hosted the Olympics in 2022, because everyone else said thanks, but no thanks.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So what does that mean for the future of the Olympic Games?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Does it mean we're going to see more and more games in countries with really poor humanitarian records?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Or could the IOC use this new reality of countries not even wanting to compete for these games to maybe step up and make some changes in the organization?
--:-- Jules Boykoff: Sure. Well, the International Olympic Committee will tell you that they have made changes in terms of the bidding process. They've tried to streamline it and so on.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: They issued a series of recommendations in December 2014 because of all this pressure that I'm talking about from local anti-Olympics groups or from people that were just skeptical of the Games.
--:-- Jules Boykoff: But I really view the Olympics as essentially like a once reliable car that is breaking down right in front of our eyes.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And instead of slowing their roll, popping the hood and looking underneath, they're actually, the International Olympic Committee, have essentially affixed a piece of duct tape over the check engine light that's winking wildly on the dashboard.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: They've kind of just plugged their ears and tried to press ahead, making use of countries, like you're suggesting, that are eager to use the games to sports wash to get rid of their local stained reputations when it comes to human rights or other issues.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Los Angeles is certainly doing a different version of sports washing. They're slated to host the 2028 Olympic Games.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And yet there's a humanitarian crisis in plain sight in Los Angeles known as homelessness.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You know, so there are still some places that are willing to take the Olympic Games on, but that's mainly because they're driven.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: These bids are driven by elites, political and economic elites in the host country that tend to benefit.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I mean, the Olympics are the ultimate exercise in trickle up economics.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: There is a lot of money sloshing through the Olympic system.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It just tends to slosh upwards into the hands of those who are already doing quite well.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Is this machinery just too big to stop? Is it too big to fail, too big to slow down?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It doesn't feel like, despite all of these controversies, things have changed very much, or that anyone's that eager to change them.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The International Olympic Committee always had this escape hatch of non-democratic countries that were happy to host in order to sportswash and sort of spruce up their reputation on the world stage.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Perhaps the Tokyo 2020 Olympics are showing us that, no, the Olympics aren't too big to fail.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I mean, I look at Tokyo as sort of like when you inject dye into a body so that you can better see the organs and the bones inside of a body.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That's what we're seeing right now with the Olympic movement.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: What's happening in Tokyo, the postponement, the pushback against hosting these games is very much like injecting dye into the Olympic body.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And right now we're seeing with ever more clarity the imperfections that plague the Olympics.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And I think this really presents an opportunity for those who care about the Olympics to fix them up in a way that's actually meaningful, not just to do these little things around the edges, but to actually push real deal change that shifts the way the money flows through the system, that gives the local hosts more autonomy and more benefits, and that really spreads the Olympic good feelings to everybody in the host city, not just those who can afford a ticket, not just those who are benefiting because they're involved with the Olympic machine in some way.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: This is a momentous opportunity and one that I haven't seen in the entire time I've studied the Olympics intensely for more than 10 years to actually make real deal change.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Jules Boykoff is the author of a number of books about the Olympics. One of them is called Nolympians, Inside the Fight Against Capitalist Megasports in Los Angeles, Tokyo, and beyond.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Another is Power Games, a political history of the Olympics.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I'm Sean Ramos from This Is Today. Explain the team includes Emily Senton, Victoria Chamberlain, Miles Bryan, Muj Zaydi, Halima Shah, and Will Reed.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Our engineers, Zafim Shapiro. Our supervising producers, Amina Alsadi.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And our brand new editor is Matthew Collette.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Liz Kelly Nelson is the Veep of Vox Audio. Jillian Weinberger is the deputy.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Laura Bullard checks our facts.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Music from Breakmaster Cylinder.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And Noam Hassenfeld, Today Explained, is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Get in touch anytime with an email. Todayexplained at vox.com.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I'm out. Thank you.
