This year’s Olympic Games has to be most bizarre yet

In the past, there have been occasions when the Olympics Games have stood out for reasons other than celebrating the joys of sport or the unity and equality of all humankind.

In 1936, in Berlin, Adolf Hitler tried to use the spectacle to showcase Ayran (read white) technological, intellectual and, most of all, physical prowess. He had to choke down his chagrin, however, as black American athlete Jesse Owens stole the show.

In 1972, at the Summer Games in Munich in the then West Germany, Palestinian terrorists stormed the Olympic Village, killing two Israeli athletes and taking nine hostage.

Later, in a bloody shootout at Munich airport, the Israeli hostages were killed, along with five terrorists and a policeman. Olympic events were suspended for 24 hours, out of respect for the dead.

In 1980, the Moscow Olympics was boycotted by more than 65 Western countries and their allies in protest against the occupation of Afghanistan by the Soviets.

This year’s spectacle has to be the most bizarre of all the gatherings since the founding, by Baron Pierre de Coubertin, of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) in 1894 and first modern Games in Athens in 1896.

Firstly, this is actually the 2020 Olympic Games – held a year later because of the global lockdowns and travel restrictions, which followed the first phases of the Covid pandemic last year. And even now, a miasma of uncertainty and Covid fear drifts across Tokyo, the host city.

There are no joyous crowds in the streets and an eerie sense of unreality has been hanging over the city, even before the pageant kicked off today.

Athletes and officials have already come down with Covid in the Olympic Village. Many have to isolate and some won’t compete at all.

It seems as though masks, sanitising, social distancing and testing will be the main events.