Opinion: Olympics making mark on history

The torch has been lit, albeit for an empty stadium, and the Olympics are underway anyway.

History is being made in so many ways.

If you’ve been keeping up, you know it’s the 2020 Summer Olympics taking place in the summer of 2021. Tokyo has a brand new 68,000-seat stadium, but only a thousand or so at a time are being allowed in to watch the action live.

This year’s lack of spectators is part of a wide range of COVID precautions being imposed on these Games, but that isn’t good enough for most Japanese citizens, who wanted them canceled altogether. Some protested outside the Olympic stadium on opening day, and for good reason.

Japan’s rate of COVID infections may be lower than the world’s (1.1 per hundred thousand in Japan, 5.0 for rest of the world), but the nation’s vaccination rate is dismal.

Reuters’ COVID-19 Tracker reports less than a third of Japan’s population is fully vaccinated. The Games opened while Tokyo was under a state of emergency, with the number of infections topping 1,000 daily.

Enter 11,000 athletes from 206 nations. COVID has already been discovered in Tokyo’s Olympic Village. Fear of a super spreader is real — and yet the Games go on.

Only three times in the 124-year history of the modern Olympics have they been canceled — in 1916, 1940 and 1944, by two world wars. This time around, Japan and the International Olympic Committee are determined they will go on.

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Every Olympics makes its mark on history, often through athleticism in the context of the state of the world at that time. When African-American track and field star Jesse Owens won four gold medals in Berlin, Germany, in 1936, he thwarted Adolf Hitler’s contention of Aryan superiority.

And closer to home and 32 years later, in Mexico City, the U.S. civil rights movement took center stage on the world’s stage when two other Black runners, John Carlos and Tommie Smith, stepped up as winners and raised their fists in a Black Power salute during the playing of the National Anthem.

Sometimes, more than a movement has made its way into the Olympics. In 1972, it was violence, when 11 Israeli athletes were taken hostage and killed by Palestinian terrorists — a tragedy that forever tarnished the Games and its peaceful underpinnings.

But the ideals and aspirations that inspire the Olympics were back in full view in 2000, when North and South Korea actually united, if only for a moment, to march together in the opening ceremony at Sidney.

Tom McDonald is editor of the New Mexico Community News Exchange. Contact him at:

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