Jack Anderson: Melbourne’s struggles make Tokyo Olympic dream look more distant
A man wearing a protective face mask walks near the Olympic rings floating in the water in the Odaiba section in Tokyo.
Last year, the Australian Open was threatened by bushfires. In mid-January 2020, Melbourne had, for a while, the worst air quality in the world as smoke spread from the ravaged east of the country. Players coughed and spluttered their way through games and, being January in Australia, it was, of course, hot. On the day of the men’s semi-finals in 2020, the temperature peaked at 42.9 Celsius in the state of Victoria.
The tennis was one of the last major sporting events to be held in Melbourne in 2020. By mid-March, the city was in lockdown. Like so many others who used to commute daily to the city centre, I have not been back in the office since.
The second of this year’s men’s semi-finals will likely just have ended as you read this but the 2021 Australia Open nearly didn’t start.
Melbourne suffered the longest lockdown in all of Australia, only ending in October. Faults in the city’s hotel quarantine system in July led to the city being the epicentre of Australia’s second wave. The July outbreak in Melbourne would later account for more than 90% of all of Australia’s fatalities from the virus.
In order to hold the Australian Open this year, an elaborate hotel quarantine and hub system had to be established for the players and their entourages.
Australians love their sport. Melbournians love their Open but apprehension about a third wave and another lockdown meant that players’ concerns about the conditions of their temporary confinement — led by Novak Djokovic — went down badly.
The fact that Djokovic has won the Australian Open men’s singles eight times did not make him immune from criticism. In fact, the general attitude to the Serb in the Australian sporting public is a bit like the country’s national dish — vegemite; you either like it or leave it.
As it happens, a traveller with asthma, allegedly using a nebuliser in hotel quarantine, is said to have been the source of another contagion this week. A snap five-day lockdown followed, ending on Wednesday.
The already limited crowds at the tennis fell to zero; worse, foot fall for restaurants and many other retailers on one of their busiest weekends of the year — Valentine’s — also fell away. The collective groan from the city about another lockdown — from the business community, from parents trying to manage home schooling, and from mental health professionals in Victoria grappling with an already extensive pandemic backlog — was physically audible.
Given the above, the residual anger among Melbournians about the exceptional measures permitting the Australian Open to take place, was totally understandable. If hosting a single, albeit global, event such as the Australia Open has proven difficult for a country with one of the lowest incidents of the virus in the world, one can only imagine the logistical difficulties currently facing the Japanese government as they prepare for the Olympics.
There is simply no way that Melbourne, a city with a deep love of sport and a former host of an Olympiad, would now permit thousands of athletes, their support personnel, and media into the country. It looks however that Japan will try and go ahead with the Games.
You must have enormous sympathy for awaiting athletes (even the qualifying process for many sports is still not clear). And a celebration of sport would be a symbol of a vaccinated world in recovery. And yet continuing with preparations for the Games seems incongruous with, if not downright insensitive to, these pandemic times.
One underlying issue is however that the IOC knows that if the Olympics has to be cancelled, that in a competitive sporting calendar, the Games might begin to lose their attractiveness to sponsors. The demographics on who now watches the Olympics is greyer than even before — hence skateboarding at the Tokyo Games and breakdancing at Paris 2024 as the IOC tries on creaky commercial knees to “get down with da kids”.
Moreover, the next Games are a winter Olympics in China. Diplomatic pressure and lobbying by human rights groups centring around the Chinese government’s maltreatment of the Uyghurs peoples has increased the possibility of targeted boycotts.
The only thing certain for now is that when the IOC wrestles with its conscience, it usually wins gold.
As global concerns about sport continue, here in Melbourne cricket season is giving way to footy. The AFLW is continuing apace with a distinctly Irish flavour. Cavan’s Aisling Sheridan is playing great stuff for Collingwood. Brid Stack, as you will know from these pages, was hard done by when an AFL appeals tribunal inexplicably seemed to forget that the duty of care on a footy field lies with the tackler and not the tackled.
More local still, but unique to the GAA world, the season has started in Victoria. All codes and GAA clubs in the state — some with Australian-born players — were represented at the first tournament of the year, the Garryowen 9s on February 7. Collingwood’s, Mayo, and Ireland’s Sarah Rowe was spotted in the crowd, as was Cork’s Mark Keane. The tournament was named after a stalwart of the GAA in Melbourne who sadly died late last year — Ted O’Sullivan, originally from Rathmore in Kerry.
Ted was one of those people that clubs of every sporting kind need and have — a doer. His sons poignantly presented the various trophies at the end of the tournament.
A huge 7s competition, organised by the Pearse’s club, will take place this week. And, for a number of hours on Sunday, many young Irish in Melbourne will again have a chance to forget the virus and to remember their infectious love of sport, community, and home.
