Massacres, doping and overspending have marred Games over the years and this time it is Covid that hangs overs Tokyo 2020
As it is now, so it has always been. Eighteen months after the first modern Olympic Games, at Athens in 1896, the entire organising committee resigned en masse because they thought the job was impossible. The country was, in the phrase of the prime minister, Charilaos Trikoupis, “regretfully bankrupt”. He told the fledgling International Olympic Committee that the economic situation meant there was no way the Games could go ahead. The IOC’s founder, Pierre de Coubertin, heard but didn’t listen. Instead he got to work, wheedling, cajoling, politicking, pushing ahead regardless.
“To those who followed closely the preliminaries, it appeared certain that the Games would be a disastrous failure,” wrote the British competitor George Robertson, who took part in the discus. “This was not the case.” Coubertin won the support, and financial backing, of the Greek royal family. And Trikoupis lost a general election in 1895, to a rival who had publicly backed the Games.
