Every evening near the Olympic Stadium in Tokyo hundreds come to pose for a photo with a sculpture of the Olympic rings, queueing more than 50 yards for their turn. They look through the perimeter fence as we head on inside to see world records smashed and gold medals won in the greatest sporting show on earth.
This is the nearest the Japanese public can get to the Games; to wave at us or hold up a sign — “Love the Olympics!” — as they peer through the wire mesh and listen for any noise from a crowdless venue as the setting sun casts a purple haze over Tokyo.
In this area next to the Japan Olympic Museum — with an expanding board on the wall of Japanese medallists — there is a daily communion. And if the idea of peering through a fence sounds sad, in fact it is a remarkably happy crowd.
They come to feel a little part of this grand event, to feel a connection with the Olympics, like the gathering outside Mezzo Bar in Roppongi on Tuesday night cheering Japan’s men against Spain in their football semi-final.
“We are just trying to enjoy the Olympics as best we can,” Yuri Sato explains, sitting on a barstool on the street watching the game with friends. “We’re proud that Tokyo managed to put on these Olympics. I don’t think any other city could do this at such a time.”
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A little further down the road, in the Hobgoblin Pub — Abbot Ale on tap, all the way from Suffolk — Toshi Tsuji, a student, captures what seem to be the many conflicting thoughts of Japanese people.
He talks of the huge cost — and worries that the full financial impact has not yet hit — but disappointment that he never got to use the tickets his family had bought for these Games has turned into enjoyment of them. “We are making the most of it while we can,” he says, as cheers go up at another last-ditch tackle to resist the Spanish siege.
Among those I spoke to, these Olympics — even if they can only be digested on TV — are an enthralling distraction from the reality of a world that still grapples with a pandemic. Given everything, why not eke what pleasure they can from these Games?
Even those here who noisily oppose the Olympics acknowledge that the sport has won around the majority. “Go to hell, Olympics!” Nami Nanami shouts through a megaphone; one of half a dozen protesters outside the stadium on Thursday night. They had hoped to make a demonstration at the Olympic rings but a heavy police presence kept them 50 yards away.
When I pointed out that most people were walking past her to take selfies against a backdrop of the stadium, Nanami accepted that she had lost the battle. “Before the Games, it was 80 per cent against the Olympics,” she said. “But when it started, attitudes changed. People see the sport and medals and they forget about the bigger problems.”
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Enjoying the Games is probably responsible for the rise in Covid-19 cases in Tokyo during the past couple of weeks. Many, especially the young, have decided that if more than 40,000 foreigners are flooding into their city, why should they not go out to bars and restaurants and take in the judo, softball and boxing on big screens with their mates?
State of emergency? An 8pm curfew on booze? You would not know it to be here. When someone complains to the police about people drinking late on the streets at the Mezzo Bar, two officers turn up and join the crowd to watch the football. It is only when the game finishes that they politely ask people to drink up and either move along or move inside. The bar, like many, stays open until the early hours.
You thought the Japanese public wanted rid of these Games? Well, the daily queue for a souvenir photo keeps replenishing. Those who gathered were remarkably accepting of their exclusion from Olympic venues, even though a city which still functions busily — tube trains filled with commuters, shops and cafés open despite a “state of emergency” — could surely have allowed, say, 50 per cent capacity, especially in outdoor arenas.
Instead, the drama comes via television and newspapers, which tell of new stars such as Hifumi and Uta Abe, the brother and sister from Kobe who won gold medals in judo on the same day.
And Momiji Nishiya, aged 13, who won a gold in skateboarding. That wall is filling up with heroes, with Japan already doubling its gold medal count from Rio 2016.
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On Monday morning the world returns to normal, but these Olympics are a break from the routine of life. After all the opposition, the mood has largely swept everyone along, like a white water canoeist. For all the many objections, an Olympics always does prove irresistible once the sport starts.
“These are the ‘mental health’ Olympics,” one leading sports administrator says, asking not to be named. It is a sensitive subject and, bizarrely, a polarising one. He has heard that some refer with disgruntlement to “Woke-yo 2020”. Too much emoting for some tastes.
It is a strange attitude. If this is an Olympics for the times we live in, of pandemic and all the challenges to jobs and mental equilibrium, it makes sense that athletes would have felt particular strains. And it has been fascinating to hear them open up about it.
There could hardly be a story more of the zeitgeist than Simone Biles, the gymnastics superstar who walked off mid-competition and then educated the world about the “twisties”, talking with remarkable candour about demons and mental challenges.
Would it have been different for her without a year’s delay? With fans to cheer her on? Without the claustrophobic intensity mentioned by many others, including Adam Peaty, and which had Katie Ledecky, the great American female swimmer, sobbing in the pool and in the mixed zone?
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These athletes were not moaning — “I’d much rather people be concerned about people who are truly struggling in life. It’s such a privilege to be in an Olympics,” Ledecky said — but they were laying bare all that goes into training, and peaking, for an event that they feared might never happen.
Biles could have swept out of a back door, and hidden away with her vulnerabilities. Instead she came forward and spoke in one of the most impressive press conferences I have seen. Watching her return for bronze on the balance beam was joyous. In Biles’s story, we saw — as much as in any golden performance — the pressures and challenges of being brilliant, and staying brilliant and meeting all our expectations.
“Is it mental health or simply the human condition?” that administrator pondered. Well, we have seen plenty of both. Dina Asher-Smith and Katarina Johnson-Thompson came to Tokyo seeking life-defining triumphs, only for their hopes to be dashed, tearfully, by injuries.
The Olympics are like a grand human opera. All of life is represented here — a transgender debate involving Laurel Hubbard, the New Zealand weightlifter; the political asylum of Krystina Timanovskaya, the Belarusian sprinter, who refused to fly back to her country and now has taken shelter in Poland. It is a great theatre of ambition and striving, chasing dreams and coping with failure. And, when it comes to the sport, these Olympics have been as enthralling as any I have seen.
Wonders and marvels spring up at an Olympic Games out of nowhere. You go to an event to write one story and another great tale appears like magic.
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You can be sent to study the Hubbard furore and come across Emily Campbell, who was described by one British Olympic figure this week as his favourite medal winner of the Games.
Campbell is not on National Lottery funding and only took up weightlifting five years ago. Her training in Bulwell, Nottinghamshire, has been aided by free fruit and vegetables from the local market, and a cobbler repairing her weightlifting shoes free of charge. And there she was, crying with joy on the podium, as the first British woman to win a medal in the sport, silver around her neck.
One piece could never hope to do justice to the richness and endless variety at an Olympics. These Games have thrown up daily dramas, though you may have to take my word for it, given a lot of it happened between 1am and breakfast time BST.
New sports have triumphed, with any snobbery about skateboarding washed away in a thrill of tricks and grabs and gleefully “stoked” athletes.
The kids made an Olympics look fun — we could do with more of that.
Mixed-relay events in swimming and triathlon were an undoubted hit, challenging other sports to think about what they can do to modernise. British medals have come in unusual places — a 13-year-old girl on a skateboard, a BMX freestyler doing backflips, the mixed triathlon — which have refreshed the story.
We can — and often do — obsess about the medal table, but it is the moments that make a Games: Tom Daley winning gold at last from the diving board and then knitting himself a pouch for his medal; the indomitable Peaty; Keely Hodgkinson, a teenager you may not have heard of a week ago, running an Olympic 800m race faster than Kelly Holmes. Hodgkinson is a student, also without Lottery funding, yet is now among the best athletes in the world.
How about Ahmed Hafnaoui, the 18-year-old from Tunisia who was so shocked to win the men’s 400m freestyle swim that he had no uniform to wear on the podium, instead pulling on a T-shirt and shorts.
I cannot remember a gold medal more amazing than that of Anna Kiesenhofer, an Austrian amateur who trained herself while working as an academic in mathematics, winning the women’s road race because the leading riders did not even know she was there. There was the blistering heat of the women’s 100m final, followed by the ice-cold froideur between Elaine Thompson-Herah, the victor, and Shelly-Ann Fraser-Price, the runner-up; Karsten Warholm outrageously sprinting 400m over hurdles in less than 46 seconds; Mutaz Essa Barshim, of Qatar, and Gianmarco Tamberi, of Italy, leaping into each other’s arms after agreeing to share the top step of the high jump podium. The Olympics is about smashing each other in ferocious competition, but it can be about a whole lot more.
Even in the heat of Tokyo in August, the shrill of cicadas a soundtrack at some venues in the absence of fans, we have seen world-class performances. Perhaps fraudulent ones, too, to be discovered down the line. As we said, all of human life is here, and it has been forced to adapt like never before.
Dame Katherine Grainger, veteran of five Games as a rower and now chairwoman of UK Sport, understands how it has been for those athletes. “We wondered how it would feel, how would it sound? It was always going to be different without crowds but you can’t tell me that the medals mean any less or the multitude of feats is any less amazing than any Olympics,” Grainger says. “If anything, I would say there is a special gratitude among the athletes that they had the chance to perform. After all the doubts and the worrying whether these Games would even take place, we’ve seen incredible performances day after day.”
We were right to be worried that, instead of a Super Saturday, these Games might be a Super Spreader, but Tokyo 2020 testing figures released this week showed 105 positives out of 514,461 saliva tests among all athletes, staff and media, and only 35 positives among 42,183 arrivals into the country.
There was not a positive among more than 800 British athletes and staff who came to Japan; Amber Hill, the shooter, was ruled out by a positive test before leaving Britain. “Getting everyone to the start line was the biggest challenge,” one staff member says. “That has felt like a huge achievement in itself.”
Of course, no one wants another Games like these, with masks on the podium and, especially, with no fans. Every Japanese triumph, in particular, has brought a sense of what might have been at a skateboarding track, or a boxing arena, if only the place had been packed with noisy locals.
“After we had to accept the decision to have no spectators, I must admit that I was concerned these Games could become Games without a soul,” Thomas Bach, the IOC president, said. But he was also right to say that the athletes, as ever, had spectacularly redeemed the Covid Games.
It has certainly been an Olympics of its time, but also in the way that it has proved the worst fears wrong.
It came through, with spirit and uplifting resilience. We can think of what was missed. I will depart extremely thankful that they happened at all.
