If you go to a competition in the next
Tokyo Olympics
, whether as an athlete, official or as a spectator, if the event finally welcomes the public, the anti-coronavirus behavior manual they just published the
WATCH
and the organizing committee warns you very seriously: In the stands you can applaud, but not cheer by singing or shouting.
The fault of it, and the publication of this
32 page manual
unprecedented in the history of sport, is of course the
coronavirus
, a changing reality that does not abandon us, that delayed the Olympic Games for a year and that continues to fill the so-called 2020 Games with unknowns, despite the fact that they will be held, if the coronavirus does not prevent it, in the summer of 2021, because the COI and JapanDespite rumors to the contrary, they are determined to be disputed.
A Tokyo citizen with a mask walks past a mural with the 2020 Games mascots
How should people behave to fight the spread of the pandemic? 15,400 athletes Olympians and Paralympians and tens of thousands more than as officials, journalists or even the public will travel to Japan in six months, a country today in a state of emergency? The manual explains it, after intense previous work that contemplated four different scenarios, from one with travel restrictions to another, the most optimistic, in which the pandemic had almost disappeared, he explained.
Lucia Montanarella
, IOC chief of media operations, in a meeting with the International Association of Sports Press. “The current scenario is very similar to one that we had created, with the pandemic still among us, and some countries that can contain it and others cannot”. Thus, the anti-Covid Games manual talks about the creation of safe bubbles in Tokyo, and will be updated with changing protocols as the July 23 opening approaches.
Tokyo 2020 expressly asks the Olympic family to minimize social interaction, wear a mask and avoid closed and crowded spaces, avoid contact greetings and complete a
test PCR negative 72 hours before arrival in Tokyo, proof that it will be repeated there and several more times throughout the stay in Japan. “We know that we face a great challenge, creating a bubble for all athletes. It is one thing to create a bubble for 200 athletes in a single sport, and quite another to create it for thousands of athletes of different sports. “Montanarella acknowledges. And there is no talk of quarantines mandatory prior, although self-responsibility, and not vaccinations, because the IOC has already realized that the current speed of vaccination in many countries makes it impossible to require that all athletes arrive vaccinated.