Tokyo Olympics

The Olympics are a bad deal for host cities. And they’re starting to take notice.

In 2013, when it bid for the 2020 Summer Games, Tokyo thought it would be spending $7.3 billion. By summer 2020, an Oxford economist told the Associated Press that Tokyo’s costs had already more than doubled to $15.84 billion. Local organizers have disputed that total — though they admitted in December 2019 that costs had risen to $12.6 billion. But competing estimates from a national audit board and national newspapers contend it could be nearly $30 billion.

The Toyko Olympics appear unlikely to be a “superspreader” event, experts say — but that may be little comfort to people in Japan, where a combination of the delta variant and low vaccination rates is driving a new surge in Covid-19 cases.

Japan is currently living through its fifth wave since the start of the pandemic, while the Summer Olympics are finally being held after a one-year delay. The average number of daily new cases jumped from 1,400 in late June up to more than 5,700 as of July 29, nearly matching the previous peaks in May and January.

There are few single events that demand as much skill as the 400-meter hurdle race. It’s not as simple as just running and jumping. Olympians need to have the speed of a 200-meter dash runner, the endurance of an 800-meter runner, an understanding of rhythm, and, of course, the ability to efficiently clear a hurdle.

Various techniques can make or break a race. For one, hurdlers don’t “jump” — they sprint right over the barrier. If you hurdle too high, you’re wasting time and energy; too low and you collide with a hurdle. Even if your technique over the hurdles is perfect, you can’t win if you don’t have the speed — but starting too fast could lead to burnout later in the race.

This summer’s Olympic Games could be the warmest in decades. Tokyo, where the Games will be held, may see dangerously high temperatures, in excess of 90 degrees.

The athletes will likely be prepared. Scientists like Oliver Gibson, an exercise physiologist at Brunel University in the UK, have spent decades studying how athletes can adapt to extreme heat conditions. He says that with training, the human body has a remarkable capacity for cooling itself when the temperature rises.

As children, we’re often told that we can do anything we put our minds to. I guess we’re okay with deceiving children because this is a complete lie. No matter how hard we try, there are things Simone Biles can do that none of us will ever achieve.

Over the past eight years, Biles has dominated the competition, winning four Olympic gold medals and 19 world championship medals and getting four maneuvers named after her. She hasn’t lost a major competition since her debut in 2013, a time when Barack Obama was still president. Her talent at strong tumbling combined with execution has made her a transformative and unsurpassed gymnast — she’s taken a sport that is judged to the decimal and won by full points.

Three years ago, more than 150 women testified in court that Larry Nassar, a former doctor for USA Gymnastics and sports medicine physician at Michigan State University, had subjected them to sexual abuse in the guise of medical care.

Since then, he has been sentenced to more than a century in jail, USA Gymnastics has filed for bankruptcy, and a reckoning around the abuse of gymnasts has swept the world.

Members of the Ugandan boxing team tested positive for Covid-19 after landing in Tokyo back in June. In early July, a Serbian rower did too. The weekend before the Games began, the first people in the Tokyo Olympic Village tested positive for Covid-19; first, two South African soccer players, then a Czech volleyball player.

American tennis player Coco Gauff had to drop out of her first Olympics because of a positive test, and an alternate gymnast for Team USA — though fully vaccinated — tested positive for Covid-19, and is now spending the Games in her hotel room, under quarantine. A US men’s beach volleyball player, testing positive, will likely be disqualified from a weekend match.

China is slated to host the 2022 Winter Games in Beijing. But a growing chorus of human rights activists is calling for countries to boycott the games over the Chinese government’s human rights abuses, including the persecution of Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang, which the US State Department has called a “genocide.”

A coalition of around 180 human rights advocacy groups has issued a “call to action” urging all countries and athletes to boycott what they’re now calling the “genocide Olympics.” If Beijing is allowed to host an Olympics-spectacle-as-usual, they say, it amounts to acceptance of the Chinese government’s atrocities against the Uyghurs, its anti-democratic crackdown in Hong Kong, and its other human rights abuses.

The Olympic torch was making its way across Japan last week to herald the upcoming Tokyo Games, scheduled to start in late July after being postponed last year due to Covid-19, when it hit a snag: The governor of Hiroshima prefecture, the next destination on the route, announced he was pulling the relay off the streets of his city because of a surge in Covid-19 cases in the country. The governors of Hyogo and Okayama did the same.

It wasn’t the first setback for the torch relay. Earlier this month, eight staffers who worked on the relay contracted Covid-19.

The 2020 Summer Olympics in Tokyo, Japan, have officially been postponed because of the coronavirus pandemic.

The decision came after the novel coronavirus forced America to start shutting down in recent weeks: universities sending students home, sports being canceled, bars and restaurants closing. Also closing were the pools and gyms where US athletes train for the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo, Japan. That included facilities in Colorado Springs, Colorado, and Lake Placid, New York.