By Harry Campbell, Social Media Editor
Artwork by Shonali Palacios, Design Lead
The Olympics are magical. I understood them well by the time I was ten: The ancient Greeks were so smart and so good at sports that they invented The Olympics. When they wised up and learned the importance of kindness, they let other countries in on the Olympics, too. The Greeks felt bad for the cold countries, so they made the Winter Olympics so they would feel better. Greece got lame with age, so they had to let other countries take turns hosting the Olympics. Eventually, they let America add basketball, and now everyone in the world holds hands every two years and celebrates unity and peace (even Mario and Sonic).
I may have been a little starry-eyed, but I hope you’re willing to give my younger self a pass.
In reality, the Olympics are like getting roped into selling essential oils, but instead of a girl you went to high school where you could find out that, it’s a bunch of good swimmers and the fastest guy.
Nevertheless, world leaders are sold on the Olympic golden goose. Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe secured the 2020 games in 2013, just two years after the combined disasters of an earthquake, tsunami, and the Fukushima nuclear meltdown. While Shinzo Abe pitched the Olympics as a means of economic relief and recovery for the region, Kansai University professor Satoko Itani explained that the opposite effect took place. Itani says that heavy equipment, cranes, and construction materials being used in the recovery areas were recalled and sent to Tokyo for Olympic construction.
Besides the debunked myth that these Olympics were remotely philanthropic, there’s more to the story. Jules Boykoff, professor of Politics and Government at Pacific University and author of Power Games: A Political History of the Olympics, has called for ethical commitments by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to prevent “overspending, militarization of police, citizen displacement, greenwashing and corruption,” or for the abolition of the committee altogether.
Boykoff explains that the Olympics are essentially a trickle-up scheme. The International Olympic Committee does well financially, and whichever major broadcaster gets the rights to show the games (the Olympics were privatized in a major way during the 1984 Los Angeles Games) makes millions of dollars in advertising sales. Finally, those in charge of construction are blessed with decreased zoning regulations and plenty of new real estate opportunities. On the other hand, athletes, who are supposedly the ones to be celebrated during the games, are shorted-hard. Boykoff spells it out, “There’s been really good research done just in the last year by Ryerson University… They compared the National Basketball Association, the National Football League, the National Hockey League, Major League Baseball, and the English Premier League of football. In all those leagues, the athletes got between 45 and 60 percent of the revenue. For Olympians it’s 4.1 percent. So the money is not going to the worker athletes. It is going to these other entities.” The Olympics are presented as celebrations of greatness, and then are twisted into multibillion-dollar sprees of unbridled capitalism.
Not to mention the forgotten victims of the Olympic projects. For the Seoul Games, 720,000 people were forcibly moved. The 2008 Beijing Games? 1.5 million. As recently as the 2016 Rio games, entire favelas were bulldozed and the spirit of the city disemboweled for an Olympic Tennis Center. Every Olympics, the poor and the working class hear the same story: The Olympic Games need land for a new stadium, and that’s just more important than your home.
All of this is made worse by the conditions the 2020 Tokyo Olympic Games took place in. Seven years of preparation and construction only for the COVID-19 pandemic to upend the entire endeavor. The New York Times writes that “[a] government audit conducted before the pandemic had already put the real price at $27 billion.” Costs were estimated to go up about 20% with the year’s delay, and the last-minute ban on spectators not only puts the Olympics and the Japanese Government at a loss, but all small business owners in Tokyo that invested in themselves expecting extra foot traffic from tourists are in the hole.
If they’re lucky, they might be able to hear some fireworks from their restaurant.