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Tokyo says goodbye to the Games with grace and sense of relief

 

arewell then, Tokyo 2020. On a sweltering night at the Olympic Stadium, Japan said goodbye to its troubled, quietly glorious Games with a closing ceremony that was by turns elegant, sombre and hilariously unbound. Not to mention, in the grand Olympic tradition, crammed full of schmaltz and corporate doublespeak.

At 10pm local time the IOC president, Thomas Bach, emerged on to his lighted plinth to declare Tokyo 2020 closed – and to offer up something else too, to lobby for its place in history.

 

“Dear athletes, over the last 16 days you have amazed us,” Bach told his worldwide TV audience, coming on like an irresistible corporate rain-maker in turquoise tie, light blue suit and crisp white mask, and surrounded with the traditional hand of handsome young people draped in medals.

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“You created the magic of these Olympic Games, Tokyo 2020. You were stronger because we all stood together in solidarity.” There is a weary Olympic bingo to these platitudes, these join-the-dots uplifting statements. But for all the usual peace stuff, the unity stuff, there was an added urgency here as Bach used his closing notes to apply the IOC gloss to the way these Games in the time of plague will be remembered.

Tokyo has been a warm, courteous and resourceful host, but also a troubled one. Outside the stadium there were protests in the streets and cries of “No Olympics” as the delegates, wonks and team members left the show at the end. The display of disaffection was orderly but assertive, marking the anger many people have felt at the staging of this global event in a city where the line between contagion and control is already stretched thin.

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“You were competing fiercely with each other in pursuit of Olympic gold,” Bach went on. “At the same time you were living together in peace. This is a powerful message of solidarity and peace. For the first time since the pandemic began the entire world came together. Sport returned to centre stage … This gives us hope. This give us faith in the future.” Does it though? As ever these occasions tend to pose other questions.

Questions like, what is the Olympics actually for? Why, exactly, are we doing this? The Olympic Games still likes to style itself as “a movement”, an arm of international relations, a force for fellowship and joy, as opposed to, say, a heavily branded corporate circus. The insistence on these transcendent qualities springs from the burden the Games place on those sleeted to host and fund it. That empty host stadium cost $1.3bn (£0.9bn). There must also be magic dust.

This kind of talk might carry more weight with critics of the Olympic-industrial complex were it not for the fact this celebration of love, so recently in Azerbaijan and Russia, heads next to China for the winter Games. But never mind that for now. Just look at the lights.

“The Olympic Games of Tokyo 2020 are the Olympic Games of hope, unity and peace,” Bach concluded, having maintained, disingenuously, that the reason for staging Tokyo 2020 at such a dangerous time was to fulfil the wishes of the athletes, as opposed to commercial contracts carrying ruinous losses.