PC: “Can’t wait to see what this world class city does for its Olympics. Snapped this shot of the 2020 Olympic poster in the one of the subway stations. #olympics #tokyo #tokyo2020 #japan” by glubbert is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0
On Friday night, the 23rd, the 2020 Olympic Games held its opening ceremonies thus officially getting the games underway.
With a year’s delay due to the continued COVID pandemic saga, and a lot of people, both inside and outside of the host country, Japan, calling for a further delay or cancellation of the games, the call was made that the games should commence, regardless.
And so far, at least from this humble writer’s opinion, the call for the games to get underway was a good one. The realization of this came quickly, during the first few minutes of the opening ceremonies. In that performance, it showed a lowly athlete running on a treadmill, all alone. It was a demonstration in which the image itself spoke volumes about what the world has been enduring since the first day of this pandemic.
The visuals continued, as well as the emotional quotient of the performances as a moment of silence was held for those who lost their lives to COVID, as well as the Israeli athletes who lost their lives in 1972 at the Munich Games.
One main theme that came from the ceremony, for me, was the simple fact that despite the odds, chances, and caution, the world was finally pivoting from pausing to continuing with some semblance of life. Don’t get me wrong, we are nowhere near the normalcy of the past, symbolized by the empty stands in the Olympic venues.
However, even with the differences from normal, the fact that events are going on is as positive a symbol that we are more close to living with this saga than trying to run away and trying to re-write it to our narrative.
And that pivot is important because the scientists tell us that we are going to have to live with this COVID threat for a good time to come. So any further effort to try and bend back the virus direction by locking up the world and affecting billions to kill the virus is, at least it seems, yielding to the reality of the situation.
Now it is hoped that this yielding to reality – symbolized by the Olympics – will develop more plans to both keep opening up while developing more techniques to deal with the virus, into the future.
After all, the Olympics in Tokyo determined that the show goes on, so we should also think the same way now.