There wasn’t much to it, which was the point. The music stopped. An announcement was made. The stadium’s few thousand spectators—media, dignitaries, sponsors—rose to their feet and were silent. The empty seats remained empty. Public grief for lives lost during the pandemic was turned private, compressed, contained within the space of a minute. The music started again. The pace of the entertainment picked up. There was tap dancing, flag waving, live pictograms, a flying drone globe. The Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games had begun.
Moments of silence at sporting events are almost inescapable these days. They are an anodyne, if awkward, way of not only acknowledging some fresh horror—terrorist attacks, natural disasters, celebrity deaths—but also letting the game go on. It is as if the silence contains an apology for, and an absolution of, the first pitch or kickoff that follows, and all the euphoric forgetting that comes with it. During the broadcast of the opening ceremonies, the moment of silence came about twenty minutes in, and it passed uneventfully. But on Twitter—which, of course, is never silent—journalists started reporting that, when the music died down, you could hear protesters chanting outside the stadium, demanding that the Games stop now. Even in the quiet, there was no escaping the noise.
The reason for the protests, of course, was the same as for the silence: millions dead in a global pandemic, and many still dying. In Japan, where less than thirty per cent of the population is vaccinated, there has been acute anxiety over bringing more than eleven thousand athletes, many of whom are unvaccinated, into the country to compete. The majority of Japanese do not want the Games to be held now. Medical experts have advised against it. Some major sponsors, despite paying hundreds of millions of dollars for the right to be associated with the Games, stayed away from the opening ceremonies; Toyota cancelled its Olympics-themed ads in Japan. More than a hundred people associated with the Games have already tested positive for COVID-19. Given the scale and scope of the international event, those results were to be expected. There are strict protocols in place to separate the local population from the athletes, though already there are signs that the barrier is more porous than promised. The steady drip of cases is unlikely to stop in the next two weeks, and neither is the scrutiny given to them; the only question is whether the attention on the sports themselves will drown it out, and what happens when the Games end.
The strange opening ceremonies only amplified the dissonance—the symbolic imagery and invocations of recovery, renewal, and togetherness that played out in front of a mostly empty stadium built to seat sixty-eight thousand people. Smaller contingents of athletes paraded than in previous years, almost all of them in masks. Ever since it was announced, last year, that the Olympics would be postponed by a year, the 2020 Games were heralded as a “beacon of hope,” an opportunity to celebrate the end of the pandemic. The athletes’ amazing exploits would signal a return to human flourishing. It would be, in short, a big party. The name remained Tokyo 2020, not 2021; the idea was to pick up where the world had left off. Instead, the number 2020 has come to seem more like a stubborn curse.
What would it take for the Games to be cancelled? The moment of silence offered a clue: in addition to those who died during the pandemic, the eleven members of the Israeli delegation murdered by a Palestinian terrorist group in Munich in 1972 were acknowledged and remembered—the first time, remarkably, that that has happened at the opening ceremonies. In 1972, the Games paused for thirty-four hours, and then the competitions continued. Perhaps this is what is meant by “too big to fail”: perhaps only the outbreak of another world war would do it.
The best argument for pressing on has always been the athletes themselves—they are testaments to ingenuity, excellence, and resilience. Cheer for the Olympians, if not the Olympics. Already, the competitions are under way, and the stories are thrilling. Already we have Saikhom Mirabai Chanu, who recovered from the humiliation of three no-lifts in the clean and jerk in Rio to win a silver, bringing India its first medal of the Games; and we have witnessed the wrenching sight of Kōhei Uchimura, one of the greatest gymnasts in history, competing in his home country and peeling off the high bar when his hands slipped in an intricate pirouette. Soon, Katie Ledecky will be torpedoing toward the wall. Simone Biles will do the Biles. On a tough day recently, I saw a picture of Allyson Felix and felt an electric charge.
As Naomi Osaka dipped the torch into the cauldron and lit the Olympic flame, I found myself unwilling, or unable, to resist the Olympics as an institution, for all its Olympic-sized flaws. I grew up obsessed with the Olympics—not only with the athletes but with the idea of the Games, the rhetoric of them. I never dreamed of becoming an Olympic athlete, and yet the Olympics gave me a framework for my own aspirations. As a child, I memorized the Olympic oath. Sometimes I would whisper, “Faster, higher, stronger.” I once made a pilgrimage to the International Olympic Committee headquarters, in Lausanne, Switzerland. As I watched the flame curl around the cauldron in Tokyo, I took the moment of silence, too, and kept watching, as the Games went on.
