2021’s surreal summer of sports

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, please start making notes about 2021’s summer of sport. Keep a diary. Write stuff down. Dates and facts. Fifteen-twenty years down the line, these days around sport will read like something out of twisted fiction.

PREMIUM

In it, among other things, people will read that:

- A football player’s heart stopped beating on the field during a European Championship match and was re-started again. So was the match, after the player was moved to a hospital.

- Thousands of Japanese doctors and nurses protested over the staging of the Tokyo Olympics; the doctors about the country’s overwhelmed health system, nurses over the request by Games organisers for an additional 500 nursing volunteers to add to their 10,000-strong medical staff.

- Columbia and Argentina pulled out of hosting the Copa America due to the pandemic, but the event pushed on in Brazil, which at the time had more official deaths due to Covid-19 than any country on earth, barring the United States. A week over into the tournament, more than 140 people involved in the Copa have tested positive.

- The head of the Japanese Doctors Union said the Games could give rise to the emergence of an “Tokyo Olympic strain” of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, from the assembly of thousands of athletes and officials from every corner of the world.

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If you had to string all these facts into a film script set amidst a global pandemic—choose your story line to begin with whatever you wish, Erikson’s heart attack in Copenhagen or the nurses protest in Tokyo—nobody would buy it. But such absurdities are now par for course in the flat world of global televised sport. The show will always go on. No matter what.

Maybe that bridge had already been crossed nearly fifty years ago, in an era without cash-rich elite sport and live TV via satellite and streaming. At the 1972 Munich Olympics, a Palestinian terrorist group called Black September entered the Games village at 4am and took 12 members of the Israeli contingent hostage. Despite information available to officials about the hostage crisis and its two deaths by sunrise, the Olympic events of the day began on time. After ten hours, the Games finally came to a halt. Five Israeli athletes and six coaches were killed in the incident. Following a 24-hour break, the Games resumed. The answer to the question—why didn’t you stop?—was “to show the terrorists that they didn’t win.”

The current climate around global sport is vastly different to the incidents of Munich ‘72 and few ask “why can’t you stop?” As audience/ specatators/ consumers, we will always get our heads around every bizarre happening in sport, as we have this summer. It is not an enforced state of mind but an ingrained awareness. It is us, the 21st century audience, who are the reason that no show can ever stop.

Every major professional sport is funded, driven and kept alive by their mega events. To not host them causes cascading, catastrophic, largely financial consequences. The size of any professional sport’s global television audience determines the value of its media rights. The earnings from those media rights pumps money into the sport and its allied industries. Football’s global body FIFA, whose World Cup revenues constitute 95% of its budget says: “one fiscal year for FIFA in reality stretches across four calendar years.”

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The International Olympic Committee’s (IOC) broadcast rights revenues keep many of its smaller sports alive: a Playthegame.org article said that 15 of its 28 summer Games disciplines receive between 35% and 95% of their income from the IOC’s Olympics revenues. This is basic survival stuff for many sports, not just modern pentathlon—amateur boxing, fencing, gymnastics, shooting, rowing, canoeing, taekwondo, triathlon, hockey, sailing are also on that list of 15.

At a time like this, everything is too much of too much. The pandemic has left us with mega events piling one upon the other. Tokyo2020 (or 2021) followed by the Beijing Winter Games 2022, the summer and winter Youth Olympics, Euro, Copa, FIFA World Cup Qatar, cricket’s T20 world cups, all a blur moving to a single beat: Kachingkachingkaching.

If the pandemic has sent global sport any message, it is this: I am not going anywhere. Deal with it. This summer is showing us how it is being dealt with. UEFA’s model of 11 cities hosting a single event suddenly appears to be a more rational, even spread of resources, venues, cities, audiences, earnings. No one should be surprised if fewer cities or countries will want to take on the load of hosting mega events.

When the Tokyo Games were postponed last year, IOC chief Thomas Bach said, “The Olympic flame can really become the light at the end of this dark tunnel the whole world is going through together at this moment.” The Tokyo torch relay, as we know, has become something of a ghost event. Its Hokkaido/ Sapporo leg—venue for Olympic marathon and race walking—featured only a lone runner on deserted roads. Like modern sport in the pandemic, captured in motion, in a perfect TV frame, in isolation, somewhere in the world. Never stopping.

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