The opening ceremony had a mournful quality but the ‘Cursed Olympics’ may provide us with many moments of illumination
Unloved, uncertain, but somehow oddly unstoppable. Tokyo 2020 is finally at the door, a little weathered and wild, a year out of whack, skinny hand rapping at the knocker. It turns out this really is going to happen after all.
The Olympics has claimed to be many things down the decades, most often a beacon of hope, cauldron of joy, saucerful of love and all the rest of it. As the opening ceremony at the Tokyo National Stadium began to wind down at around 11pm local time, Thomas Bach could be heard making a series of similar generic claims about the Games as a force for peace, tolerance and freedom, a speech he will no doubt repeat with a sense of furious reforming zeal at the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics.
