Olympics • Perspective

Japan should cut its losses and tell the IOC to take its Olympic pillage somewhere else

By Sally Jenkins
Columnist
May 5, 2021 at 5:00 a.m. EDT

Somewhere along the line Baron Von Ripper-off and the other gold-plated pretenders at the International Olympic Committee decided to treat Japan as their footstool. But Japan didn’t surrender its sovereignty when it agreed to host the Olympics. If the Tokyo Summer Games have become a threat to the national interest, Japan’s leaders should tell the IOC to go find another duchy to plunder. A cancellation would be hard — but it would also be a cure.

Von Ripper-off, a.k.a. IOC President Thomas Bach, and his attendants have a bad habit of ruining their hosts, like royals on tour who consume all the wheat sheaves in the province and leave stubble behind. Where, exactly, does the IOC get off imperiously insisting that the Games must go on, when fully 72 percent of the Japanese public is reluctant or unwilling to entertain 15,000 foreign athletes and officials in the midst of a pandemic?

The answer is that the IOC derives its power strictly from the Olympic “host contract.” It’s a highly illuminating document that reveals much about the highhanded organization and how it leaves host nations with crippling debts. Seven pages are devoted to “medical services” the host must provide — free of charge — to anyone with an Olympic credential, including rooms at local hospitals expressly reserved for them and only them. Tokyo organizers have estimated they will need to divert about 10,000 medical workers to service the IOC’s demands.

Eight Olympic workers tested positive for the coronavirus during the torch relay last week — though they were wearing masks. Less than 2 percent of Japan’s population is vaccinated. Small wonder the head of Japan’s medical workers’ union, Susumu Morita, is incensed at the prospect of draining mass medical resources. “I am furious at the insistence on staging the Olympics despite the risk to patients’ and nurses’ health and lives,” he said in a statement.

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Dr. Shigeru Omi, who heads the Japanese government panel on the coronavirus response, warned a parliamentary committee on Wednesday that the virus is spreading and putting hospitals under stress. ... Olympic organizers say they will need about 10,000 medical professionals during the Olympics, and recently officials requested an additional 500 nurses. Nursing groups immediately protested, saying they were used as pawns.

“The infections are definitely spreading, including in developing countries, and so it is important to thoroughly understand this situation and know there are definitely risks,” Omi said. ... “It is time the (Olympic) organizers and others involved to be responsible and seriously start thinking about how infections are spreading, and the medical system is getting stretched thin, and then to inform the public.”

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Associated Press reporter Mari Yamaguchi in Tokyo contributed to this report.

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