Tokyo Olympics in July are a bad idea, but athletes still must focus on the present
During a recent visit to the GAGE Center in Blue Springs, where Al Fong and his wife, Armine Barutyan, are training (among many others) three members of the U.S. Women’s National Gymnastics team, Fong was acutely cognizant of the turmoil over whether the Tokyo Olympics should proceed as scheduled from July 23 to Aug. 8.
They’re “howling” about it and “almost wanting to boycott,” he said, reflecting a Kyodo News poll in April that reported 72 percent of people in Japan want the Games either canceled or postponed again after having been pushed back a year because of the pandemic.
And that’s just part of the sense of precariousness over forging ahead in a country where perhaps 4 percent of the population had been fully vaccinated through Thursday and officials are seeking to extend a state of emergency in Tokyo through June 20.
The unsettling scenario was amplified last week when the CDC in the United States warned that “all travel to Japan” should be avoided because of such a surge in COVID-19 cases that “even fully vaccinated travelers may be at risk for getting and spreading COVID-19 variants.”
Oh, and also last week, the World Players Association expressed alarm over the “rigour (sic) and resources” the International Olympic Committee is applying.
But the IOC doesn’t seem to be flinching, with IOC president Thomas Bach touting “comprehensive Covid-19 countermeasures to ensure that the athletes of the world can come together in a safe environment for everyone.”
And the U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Committee issued a statement last week that it feels “confident that the current mitigation practices in place” and intense testing “will allow for safe participation of Team USA athletes this summer.”
This reminds me of a great scene from an old Steve Martin movie, “The Man With Two Brains.” Martin’s character looks toward a painting of his late wife and asks her to give him a sign if there’s anything wrong with his feelings for another woman.
Suddenly, to a backdrop of a female voice wailing “noooo,” the house shakes, the lights flicker on and off, gusts of wind surge through the room and the frame of the painting spins wildly.
When the frenzy ends, the now-disheveled Martin says, “Just any kind of sign. I’ll keep on the lookout for it.”
Alas, it seems to us that every sign says having the Olympics in Tokyo in July has become a dreadful idea.
No matter how young and healthy the participants are and no matter how heartbreaking the thought of another delay or even cancellation would be to them, navigating an estimated 60,000 athletes, coaches, national team staff and other essential workers from about 200 countries through an imperfect bubble concept among numerous venues dependent on thousands of local workers and volunteers is fraught with risk.
Even so … what’s a would-be Olympian to do right now?
It’s a looming mindgame, to be sure. But without knowing how this will play out, they have only one real choice: take it to the limit and try to give themselves a hard decision to make with more information later assuming the IOC and Japan don’t yield to the flashing red lights.
So that has to be the approach for Fong and Barutyan’s three Olympic gymnastics hopefuls, Aleah Finnegan, Leanne Wong and Kara Eaker — who in that order finished fifth, sixth and ninth behind the ethereal Simone Biles in the U.S. Classic last week in Indianapolis.
Now they turn to the U.S Gymnastics Championships scheduled for June 3-6 in Fort Worth, Texas, from which the top eight and others determined by the Athlete Selection Committee to remain competitive for an Olympic spot will compete in the U.S. Olympic Team Trials still set for June 24-27 in St. Louis.
“Everything falls on this date,” said Fong, tapping a wall calendar where it denoted the Fort Worth event … just over a year after pointing sadly to another calendar and calling it “meaningless.”
Other major U.S. Olympic trials (including swimming in Omaha and track and field in Oregon) also are to take place in June.
Meanwhile, though, you might wonder how any aspiring Olympian can laser in right now with so much mystery hovering and what even Fong suggested was a certain sense of limbo.
But the uncertainty of the last 14 months at least has provided something substantial toward that cause for these athletes.
They became conditioned to making the most of their strange new feeling of found time when the pandemic shut down the gymnastics calendar and Fong’s center for months.
And they learned to operate within somewhat of a vacuum when it came to their sport and hopes of becoming part of the four-woman team that could potentially send two extra gymnasts to compete in individual events. It’s also expected to feature what USA Gymnastics calls “several alternates” in the event of injuries or positive COVID-19 tests.
At first, that meant adapting to makeshift workout elements at home while staying in shape and trying to maintain structure.
And that in some cases stressed, in more ways than one, cushions and mattresses.
“It was really interesting to get creative with all of it,” said a smiling Finnegan, a senior at Summit Christian Academy who will continue her career at Louisiana State University.
Or as put by Wong, a senior at Blue Valley High who will compete at Florida: “Lots of pillows and stuff on the floor and sometimes just mentally thinking about skills.”
So, sure, they were overjoyed to get back in the gym: “Just so excited to flip and get upside down and bounce on the trampoline and stuff like that,” said Eaker, the Grain Valley senior bound for Utah.
But they still were facing something bewildering: months of training without the context of outside competition and the vital structure, mileposts and learning opportunities that come with those.
“Everything that had been driving us for the past four years just came to a screeching halt,” Fong said. “It was really challenging to physically and mentally go past their perceived limitations if you don’t have a goal and a deadline.
“Between the pandemic and the uncertainty of the Olympics, you were really just talking blue sky.”
Meaning “fanciful,” according to dictionary.com, or “impractical.”
So the task was to be as practical as could be in a time like no other. They’d focus on strength and conditioning and refining skills while relaxing on broader routines, Fong said, since any idea of peaking for those was impossible.
They’d point out that this was a dream delayed, not deleted, and that somebody would keep working towards it. And that “either that’s going to be you or that’s going to be them,” Fong said.
But they’d also try to remind the girls of why they got into this in the first place, the fun of the basics. And to convey the upside of the situation, hard as it was to absorb.
“It took a while to transition and … not let ourselves fall down that ‘what if?’ kind of path,” said Eaker, who said she came to embrace the chance to “calm down and take a rest and heal and build up our strength and focus on little things.”
Now, it turns out, not falling down that “what if?” path also will be a key part of the mindset toward summoning their best amid the ongoing unpredictability of an Olympics embroiled in controversy and doubts.
This story was originally published June 1, 2021 at 5:00 AM.