Washington Post (July 24)
“The cauldron is lit in Tokyo’s covid Olympics. Let’s hope it’s not a fuse.” Frankly, the IOC only has in place a “haphazard collection of rules.” The IOC president “is lying to 11,000 international athletes with differing immune status and levels of exposure who are gathered unsafely amid a pandemic.” There is no bubble. “The only bubble at the Tokyo Games is the spit bubble coming out of Thomas Bach’s mouth.”
Tags: Athletes, Bach, Bubble, Cauldron, Covid Olympics, Exposure, Fuse, Haphazard, Immune status, IOC, Lying, Pandemic, Tokyo, Tokyo Games, Unsafely
San Francisco Chronicle (May 9)
“As much as the Warriors’ Stephen Curry and Draymond Green would love to compete for Team USA, with Steve Kerr an assistant on coach Gregg Popovich’s staff, they can’t even begin to imagine what it might be like, in Japan, with the coronavirus pandemic still raging worldwide….
The IOC should be more than merely concerned about the developments of Saturday, when Japan registered more than 7,000 new COVID-19 cases, the country’s highest total since January, due to a rapidly spreading fourth wave driven by more contagious and deadlier variants of the virus.”
Tags: Compete, Contagious, COVID-19, Curry, Deadlier, Fourth wave, Green, Highest, IOC, Japan, Kerr, Pandemic, Raging, Team USA, Variants, Warriors
Forbes (March 12)
“If the economics world handed out gold medals for unintended consequences, Japan’s Yoshiro Mori would be a shoo-in.” While “Japan has had more sexist-rant scandals,” none of those “occurred on the IOC’s watch—or during the social-media age.” The $25 billion being spent on the Olympics could, oddly, “be money well spent if the sexism scandal that felled Mori gets Japan to finally get serious about gender parity,” expanding the annual economy by the $750 billion that womenomics is expected to unleash.
Tags: Economics, Gender parity, Gold medals, IOC, Japan, Mori, Olympics, Scandals, Sexist, Social media, Unintended consequences, Womenomics
Wall Street Journal (August 10)
“If the International Olympic Committee won’t call out systematic Russian doping, at least some of the athletes at the summer games in Rio de Janiero can. So kudos to those—especially the competitors in women’s swimming—who are boldly going where the IOC feared to tread.”
Tags: Athletes, Competitors, Doping, IOC, Olympics, Rio de Janiero, Russia, Women’s swimming
USA Today (August 4)
“The main non-athletic story line of the Rio Games has to be the utter folly of hosting these costly exercises in short-term gratification. Brazil is expected to spend as much as $20 billion on the Games, this after dropping $15 billion on the 2014 World Cup.” These excesses are “back-breaking” for host countries and the IOC should be ashamed of the “scarce money to be misspent” on the Games, money which is diverted from more pressing priorities.
Tags: Back-breaking, Brazil, Folly, Host, Host countries, IOC, Misspent, Olympics, Priorities, Rio, World Cup
New York Times (September 8)
“For the International Olympic Committee, environmental concerns in Japan appeared less urgent than the Syrian war on Turkey’s border, a harsh crackdown against antigovernment protesters recently in Istanbul and Spain’s economic recession and high unemployment…. Amid such economic, political and human rights maelstroms, Tokyo was seen as a calm harbor. It won handily over Istanbul in the second round of voting, 60-36, in a secret ballot of Olympic delegates.”
Tags: Environmental concerns, Human rights, IOC, Istanbul, Japan, Olympics, Recession, Spain, Syria, Tokyo, Turkey, Unemployment
Wall Street Journal (December 3)
FIFA, the international governing body of soccer, “makes the United Nations seem like a model—well, almost—of transparency and good governance. Even the International Olympic Committee, no stranger to corruption and foul play, benefits by comparison.” The Journal is upset by recent allegations of vote buying and collusion in site selection, which may have benefitted Russia and Qatar at the expense of the UK and the U.S.
