Not even the boldest of the Black Mirror writers would have been able to imagine the images that, even after two years, remain with us from the unspeakable days of living in pandemic mode.
Just like many Argentine fans, from time to time, we wonder if it is indeed true that we came out champions in Qatar, the months of confinement, isolation, infections, deaths, swabs, chinstraps and desolation reappear to us like a nightmare in slow motion that we are not entirely sure that we have experienced them.
painful days. Crazy days. As It was crazy to have experienced an Olympic game in times when the end of the plague was a vague reference that nobody dared to predict.
All of us have fresh in our memory the impossibility, not only of traveling from one country to another, but also of crossing the limits between provinces. How can we qualify, then, that athletes, managers, coaches, volunteers and journalists from more than 200 countries have been able to meet for almost a month in a single city?
This data alone is enough to consider Tokyo 2020 (or 2021 or 2020 + 1) as one of the most extraordinary episodes in the history of sports. And of humanity.
In the midst of almost two years of not being able to do almost anything that would bring us closer as human beings, the most complete comprehensive sample of the spirit of sport made clear as never before the dimension of its energy, as undisguisable as it is inexplicable.
If the mere mention of the episode itself already means something extraordinary, the enumeration of the experiences experienced on Japanese soil exceeds any claim to fantasy.
Every time I review my experience in Tokyo, the first thing that comes to mind was the first three days of my stay in which we were only allowed to leave the hotel room for 15 minutes a day.. In a sense, nothing too different from what you and I live in our own home. For the rest, the list of circumstances that we will hardly go through again seems endless.
Namely.
The Japanese government required three PCR tests on successive days prior to the trip. Only those carried out in the winning sanatorium of the tender made for the occasion were valid.
After an endless journey of more than 36 hours, being able to remove our mask only during meal times and a first saliva test upon arrival at Narita airport, the accredited TyC Sports we had to do similar checks every other day until the end of the games.
Requirement of the Japanese government, all foreigners had to enable two applications on our cell phones. OCHA, essential to enter the country. COCOA, the one we had to enable when we reached our destination: if one disabled bluetooth, an alarm would automatically go off and the local authorities could search for you and even take away your credentials.
I soon had a sample of the dimension of the control to which we were subjected. In one of those 15-minute outings, we took the opportunity, together with our colleagues from the channel, to record the first promo on Japanese soil. In the image that accompanies this column I am wearing a T-shirt alluding to the 1964 games, the official poster of which can be seen in a giant size on the building on the other side of the street. Half an hour after I uploaded that image on my networks, I received a call from an important authority in the Olympic world. “By chance, were you recording something on the street, without a mask and with your credential hanging on your side?” He asked me. When I answered in the affirmative, he added: “I know it seems like an exaggeration, but avoid doing something like that again. Less without the mask ”.
Beyond the local sanitary protocol, the underlying problem was that, while the Japanese government insisted on bankrolling the games, the opposition put all its energy into demonstrating the risk of “inviting” so many foreigners that, in addition, they would violate the rules. Two weeks later and oblivious to such a level of persecution, we would verify not only the success of the move but the enormous prize that the German Thomas Bach, head of the IOC, took home, whose audacity and stubbornness were decisive in carrying out something that , even for colleagues of his, could have meant potentiating a disaster.
After 72 hours of confinement, we discovered that an exclusive transportation system had been set up for the foreign press. A lot of taxis were designated to work with us based on a mad logic. “If someone infected them, it would be a matter between the local driver and the foreign journalist and contagion to the citizen of the Japanese capital would be avoided.”
And so everything. With as much rigor as kindness and efficiency: I have never entered a press center having to go through so many checkpoints. It never takes so little time to get to my job.
To each obstacle the Japanese put forth their best effort to simplify the conflict. Including the manager of the hotel where we live who came to our door in person with the food package we bought through an app that, occasionally, offered 80 percent of the menus of the dining options written in English.
Against any obstacle, he would not hesitate for a second to relive that story. Suddenly, a lot of compatriots enjoyed every second of the 24 hours of Olympic broadcast that we gave ourselves. Logical: after so many months of reading the numbers of misfortune… How can we not enjoy a wrestling match between a Belgian and an Afghan!
They were days of too many emotions on the surface, of verifying that each one of us, from the most exposed to the most anonymous, were participating in something unique.
Tokyo 2020 gave us the strange feeling that there was life at the end of the dark tunnel of the pandemic.
At the end of the tour I verified that I was not the only one to whom the emptiness of the end turned into sobs. And I came home with the feeling that only the Olympic Games as an event and the Japanese as hosts could be capable of such a thing.
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