Inside Tokyo's Olympic quarantine: Life isn’t all that bad amid troubled Games

Those quarantining in Tokyo are permitted 15-minute intervals outside for food or other necessities. Picture: Brendan O'Brien

The Japanese women’s football team is opening its Olympic campaign against Canada on the TV, the chicken pakora with rice, naan bread, and veggie samosa has just been delivered to the door of the hotel room, and the sun is setting and capturing the spectacular Tokyo skyline in a silhouette that is framed perfectly through the window.

Honestly? Quarantine isn’t all that bad.

Three days confined to your quarters (with 15-minute intervals permitted outside for food or other necessities) isn’t exactly taxing for those of us asked to cover these troubled and troubling Games. If anything, the opportunity to regroup and find your feet is to be welcomed after the 24 hours door-to-door that it took to get here from Ireland.

Flying in the midst of a pandemic is as surreal as you might expect.

Ireland’s new, looser travel regulations came into effect on the day of departure. “It’s definitely busier than it has been,” said one official through a mask of utter boredom. There were no more than half-a-dozen people visible across the concourse as he offered this tidbit. Heathrow was worse, a vast walkway for international connections utterly devoid of footfall.

It was all very ‘28 Days Later’ but with less litter. And zombies.

Look at the UK news, or the scenes before the European Championship final at Wembley, and you might have expected to see prospective passengers five-deep at the bar, people licking the walls, or chucking Louis Vitton bucket hats into the air. Not a bit of it. One of the world’s busiest airports was quiet. Restrained. Like the England of Enid Blyton rather than Loaded magazine.

Bars and restaurants were mostly shuttered, the only hot fodder and booze on offer to be found was in one of Gordon Ramsey’s offerings. Avoid the tagliatelle, by the way. Try the chicken curry instead. Food, food, food. Look, it starts to dominate your thoughts when stuck in a sort of solitary but that’s better than the red tape that wound its way around the cerebral cortex before travelling.

Put it this way: there are now eight different usernames and passwords for the Games logged onto this one laptop. ICON, OCHA, extranet, accommodation, venue bookings, transport: you name it they have a department and a website for it. And don’t start with the Excel spreadsheets. The Japanese love a bit of bureaucracy anyway. Add Covid into the mix and it’s all a bit 1984.

The Orwell novel, that is, not the LA Games.

It may be that the organisers here don’t know the name of your first girlfriend, or the colour of your underwear, but they certainly know what you had for breakfast, where you slept, and pretty much every step you take given the media must stay in official hotels and download an app that traces all movements as long as they are in Japan.

It’s not a scenario that anyone would have contemplated, or accepted, two years ago but then what hasn’t changed since the pandemic started? It’s hard to quibble about personal freedoms when the Olympics are being held with Tokyo in a state of emergency and Covid cases rising again on Wednesday with 1,832 positives recorded in the previous 24 hours.

Japan’s Olympics are underway: their women’s football team has just kicked off against Canada pic.twitter.com/cbtbCC1N6a

— Brendan O'Brien (@byBrendanOBrien) July 21, 2021

Six of those were in the Olympic village but that’s not all. A Ugandan athlete went AWOL for a number of days, a member of the Chilean taekwondo team tested positive on arrival, and Amber Hill, Team GB’s No.1 ranked shooter, couldn’t even leave home after testing positive for Covid prior to her flight. “Broken,” was the word she used to describe her feelings.

The sad truth is that we will have more stories like it.

So, three hours getting through Haneda Airport when you arrived? Having trouble contacting that helpline to order your PCR testing kits for the three days in quarantine? Unimpressed with the limp ham sandwich for brekkie? Yeah, it’s not such a big deal when put in perspective. The main quibble, really, is the ad hoc nature of some of the rules.

Some members of the media have been hit with a 14-day quarantine after sharing a flight with a passenger who subsequently tested positive for Covid and yet no names are taken when journalists are transferred from half-filled planes to 52-seat buses crammed to capacity. If it seems like people are making this up as we go along then it’s only because they are.

Nobody wanted this. Nobody expected this. Holding an Olympics in the midst of this global crisis doesn’t become any more logical the closer you get to Tokyo. Quite the opposite, if anything, but the show goes on and the rest of us with it. Unless your phone pings with the news that you have tested positive or been deemed a close contact of someone else who has.

The opening ceremony and the bulk of the action can’t come quickly enough for organisers keen on a change to the narrative and athletes already anxious about their ability to compete but the underlying fear of infection, the impact it can have on individuals in a largely unvaccinated country, and the smaller matter that is the Games themselves, won’t go away.