Usually, I rather enjoy the Olympics. For example, here's my 2008 post about the opening ceremonies there (which I still haven't seen anything surpass to date). This time around is quite different, courtesy of our favorite modern plague, COVID.
Naturally, the story starts last year, which is when the Olympics were supposed to take place, but COVID was still new enough for everyone to give it a degree of respect, if not fear, and those in charge decided to postpone it to this year, a reasonable and prudent decision. Fast forward to this year, and it seems prudence and reason have dropped out of the running. We've gone from "we'll be good to go as normal this year" to "we'll have to ask foreign fans to stay in their home countries" to "not even the locals cane come and watch, and we're going to aggressively test and sequester everyone involved to limit the spread of the disease." I was fine with the earlier restrictions put in place, but the current setup says to me that the Olympics should have been canceled or postponed one more year.
Which of course brings up the question, why are they so hell-bent on pushing forward, when the global average of vaccinations is only about 25% (and in the low single-digit percent range in several countries)? Some of it is going to be the athletes themselves of course, the once-every-four-years nature of the event meaning some of them get exactly one shot at attending, and for some of those this is it. However, the various countries involved haven't had any compunctions about restricting non-essential activities and travel, which handily describes this entire event, so there must be more to it than that. Sadly, all I can see as a driving force beyond the zeal of the athletes is a mix of profit drives for the various sponsors involved and the varied goals of the nations involved, be that "proving" their people superior to their neighbors or showing their own people that things are going back to normal. Honestly, it turns my stomach, and I'm not alone in that - when significant numbers of the locals protest the opening ceremonies of the event that's supposed to be inherently non-offensive and a point of pride for your country, that's a pretty good sign that you should stop and re-evaluate.
Of course, any re-evaluation should include the ever-popular question "what's the worst that could happen?" Here's an article that lays out some of the possibilities. International super-spreader event and breakout to the local populace are possibilities I had already considered as "bad enough", but the idea of the very mix of variants and states of vaccinations that the Olympics involves could result in a new variant that evades vaccine protections and gets brought back home by those involved is impressively bad.
So, yeah, it's Olympics time. If we're lucky, only a few athletes will have adverse effects from this whole mess, and nobody will die. If we're lucky, anything that happens at the Olympics will stay at the Olympics. Personally, I'm not reassured, and seeing anything Olympics-related is going to feel like stumbling across a sleazy infomercial. I guess, enjoy it if you can, but I'm not feeling it this year.
