Too Hot To Handle: Olympics Edition
Olympic logo, but make it ~socially distanced~
TOKYO HERE WE COME! The Olympics are basically already here and if you’ve been asleep at the wheel do not worry, we are, as always, here to save you. We’ve got all the content you need to 1) know the geopolitical stakes & all the scandals surrounding these games 2) understand every sport (including the ones debuting in tokyo), 3)cheer on team USA and 4) Cheer on everyone else. That’s right there’s a LOT coming at you this week before Friday’s opening ceremonies, so let’s just get into it. This is part 1: Everything that’s happened outside of the sports.
Getting the Bid
Bidding on the Olympics is a long and complicated process that mostly involves cheating and that we don’t necessarily need to get into here, but basically what you need to offer as a potential host city is 1) stability, i.e the Olympics won’t crash your economy, because the IOC doesn’t want to have that on their rep, 2) sustainability, i.e you have to prove that either you can reuse previous stadiums (as LA will do when they host in 2028), or will be able to build in an environmentally safe way and use the buildings AFTER the games are over (like how Brazil was like “yeah we’re going to turn the Athlete’s Village into luxury condos” but forgot there was no one to BUY luxury condos because their economy was shit, see point 1) and 3) an ability to appeal to the American audience. Yes, America is a big deal! (so basically, it’s like rushing a sorority! BID DAY!!) The IOC consistently threw out bids from countries in the Southern Hemisphere because they were like “we can’t have the Games later than July/August, Americans will be too busy watching football!!!!” You may notice there’s nothing in there like “you can’t use uyghurs as slave labor that’s really uncool and we’re not going to give you the bid if you’re blatantly committing human rights violations” because the IOC is a money making operation and not an ethics commission. There are no heroes here folks. Anyways, Japan launched their bid and then got absolutely pummeled by not 1, not 2, but a TRIPLE natural disaster (earthquake, tsunami, nuclear power explosion which I guess isn’t really a natural disaster but I digress), and then were like, okay we have 9 years to get our shit together and recover from this to show the world we are BOSS BABES. Honestly, people (read: a dude I dated once who told me “European history is world history”) forget that Japan was a PRETTY BIG EMPIRE and nowadays, with all this talk about China being a massive power in Asia, Japan is feeling #leftout. So, they wanted to have these games to be like, hey, world, we are also here, and we are preeeeetty cool.
Delaying the Games
We make plans and god laughs am I right ladies?!?!?! So Japan’s big plan to dazzle on the world stage in 2020 is thwarted by the pandemonium (interesting that it started in China….Japan’s RIVAL????? @Q look into this for me), and for a hot second they were like “no we’re still gunna do it” and then like 4 million people died and they were like “mmm okay vibe IS a bit off” and postponed it to 2021. You may say, but what about the athletes? What about the preparations? What about the MONEY?!!?!?!?!? Well, what can we say! Ya win some ya lose some and last year, we lost a lot! Japan already has poured like a bunch of billions of money into this shebang so they were not SO willing to cut their losses (especially considering that the next country to host the games is…you guessed it! China!), and most of the actual revenue from the games comes from broadcasting rights (a fascinating topic for another day!) so they told the athletes (whose entire lives are built around a 4 year schedule) to HAGS and that they’ll see them next year. (this actually did provide the opportunity for some athletes to pursue other projects, like having a baby!)
COVID Protocols
And here we are! It’s next year! Again, if you haven’t been paying attention, the U.S is hogging most of the world’s vaccines, so everywhere else is still sort of doing the ~pandemic thing, especially Tokyo! They had done an excellent job at containing the virus early on (because people actually wore masks, something everyone on the subway apparently still cannot grasp), and were slow to vaccinate people, so now they’re in a biiiiiiiit of a state of emergency. People in Tokyo are pretty pissed about this, don’t really want the games to happen anymore, but they’re already here and again THERE WAS A LOT OF MONEY INVOLVED (also Shinzo Abe, former PM, was like “we’re a democracy so we can’t fail because that would be bad for democracies everywhere”, which is like, A LOT of side eye @china). There will be no spectators, which is a big deal (also we don’t know yet if they’re going to do the fake crowd noise situation so stay tuned), there will be no sex allowed at the Athlete’s Village (see: cardboard beds, as if that’ll stop those crazy kids, and the fact that they’re not providing the usual condoms until the athletes LEAVE like a freaking GIFT BAG)- also making this the first Olympic Games to be a spin off of Netflix’s Too Hot To Handle, and there will be some very weird medal ceremonies (kind of a DIY vibe). You might think, oh and everyone will be vaxxed right? No! That is, WILDLY, not required. These are just the highlights, you can get into all the protocols here.
Other fun mistakes!
To be fair to Japan, they’re not unique here. There are ALWAYS a lot of critiques of the Olympics right before they start, and then they flash a GOLD MEDAL at us and we get distracted by the pretty necklace and forget that, idk, there are a lot of human rights violations involved in this whole shebang. But I have yet to see a gold medal, so I am still a little preoccupied with the mistakes right now, and they are boofing it left and right! Other than the fact that 55 people in the “Olympic Bubble” have already contracted COVID (including Coco Gauff), they’ve also lost an athlete (dw they found him but like, still) and the temperatures in tokyo have been off the charts (as I said, it is LITERALLY too hot to handle!). Still, it’s not ALL the fault of the organizers in Tokyo, there have also been a bunch of different types of scandals across multiple countries! Honorable mentions in the field of sexism include: this canadian basketball player having to campaign to bring her baby (whom she is breastfeeding) with her, the Norwegian Handballers getting in trouble for not wanting to have their asses on display for the world to see, and softball, a debut sport (FOR LADIES!), will be played on a baseball field (they’re different, fyi!). Two special shout outs to these ~paralympic scandals: a paralympic champion getting told her shorts were too short and another being denied a request to bring along her aid (she’s deaf & blind, but yeah okay USOPC she’ll just find a way over there on her own). And lastly, even though it might seem so two weeks ago to a lot of you, there’s the slew of racist scandals that have come out around the games: athletes being disqualified over higher testosterone levels, swim caps for natural hair being outlawed, and DO WE EVEN NEED TO TALK ABOUT SHA’CARRI (I mean, I will, loudly, to anyone that brings it up).
We’re not trying to kill your buzz, don’t worry, we’re still very hype about these Olympics and there will still be a lot to celebrate. We are, as always, just trying to give y’all a well rounded and educated view on all the garbage that goes into these here two weeks of glory, so that you can consume the content more consciously (say that 5x fast). Everyone comment your FAVE scandal in the comments, keep an eye out for our other (we promise more peppy) posts, and, stock your fridges with some good ol’ fashion american beers because we will be chugging a beer for every gold medal won by Team USA. Cheers!
