Originally published at: Tokyo has banned Olympic spectators | Boing Boing
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Once again, the question is asked: why even bother?
Once again, the real answer remains unspoken by those in charge: corrupt Olympic committee officials need to collect their loot, as do the corporate sponsors and TV networks.
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So the opening ceremony will be a person at one end of the stadium with a flag and a person at the other end with a torch while a video is projected onto the floor?
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Good.
Any estimates on how much Japan stands to lose from this debacle?
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Less than Greece did…
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Fixed that quote for him.
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Fixed it for you.
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The Olympics should be cancelled, due to the pandemic, but all the crap they pulled in the last couple decades just makes me not want to watch or care.
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Crap. Thanks!
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It isn’t too late for them to take up my idea of a Twitch Olympics. Everyone stays home and does their events separately; streaming themselves.
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What, and miss out on the international display of competitive sports medicine?
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No, the opening ceremony will be held for the sake of the “VIPs,” sponsors and other hangers-on (apparently there are about 10,000 in all)
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The opening ceremony is already an omnishambles.
And that was after the original ceremonies committee members were sacked last year and their plans abandoned. Yes, there would have been a shoutout to Akira.
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I assume that there was some amount of face-saving/technically-delivering-on-stupid-promises involved as well.
On the IOC and friends side purely mercenary motives are a plausible explanation; but it’s harder to comprehend the voluntary cooperation of the necessary people on the host nation side without either positing regulatory capture on a pretty dramatic scale(especially in a case like this, where you don’t just need to play a municipal government enough to get them to sign up to do something stupid and expensive; you need to keep everyone with the authority to partially or wholly spoil the party on emergency grounds from stepping in); or attributing some of their enthusiasm to a desire to notch up a prestige spectacle for themselves rather than see it go to someone else.
The prestige incentive seems especially plausible given trends in IOC bids from relatively democratic and more or less authoritarian countries: it appears that playing host is generally recognized as a suckers game, enough so that whatever direct corruption is available is often inadequate to ram a bid through if popular approval is required; but people who don’t really need to worry about popular approval still seem to think that whatever they gain by throwing money into the pit is worth it.
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I’ve got no problems with an Akira opener.
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Unfortunately you probably won’t get one.
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