Fuck The Olympics

While a major super-spreading event is possible, even a lower level of transmission could cause chaos. Officials and volunteers would suddenly be absent. Athletes may miss crucial races. Team sports could be cancelled.

How Can the Olympics Protect 78,000 Volunteers From the Coronavirus?

They are being offered little more than a couple of masks, some hand sanitizer and social-distancing guidance that may be hard to abide by.




TOKYO — For Olympic host cities, one of the keys to a successful Games is the army of volunteers who cheerfully perform a range of duties, like fetching water, driving Olympic vehicles, interpreting for athletes or carrying medals to ceremonies.



If the rescheduled Tokyo Games go ahead as planned this summer, roughly 78,000 volunteers will have another responsibility: preventing the spread of the coronavirus, both among participants and themselves.



For protection, the volunteers are being offered little more than a couple of cloth masks, a bottle of sanitizer and mantras about social distancing. Unless they qualify for vaccination through Japan’s slow age-based rollout, they will not be inoculated against the coronavirus.



“I don’t know how we’re going to be able to do this,” said Akiko Kariya, 40, a paralegal in Tokyo who signed up to volunteer as an interpreter. The Olympic committee “hasn’t told us exactly what they will do to keep us safe.”



As organizers have scrambled to assure the globe that Tokyo can pull off the Games in the midst of a pandemic, the volunteers have been left largely on their own to figure out how to avoid infection.


www.nytimes.com/2021/05/02/world/asia/olympics-volunteers-coronavirus.html

The Tokyo Olympics must go ahead

COVID has raised the stakes of hosting the Games to unprecedented levels but we need the Olympics more than ever before.

Johnny Luk



After 18 months of relentless battles against a common enemy, we need the Olympics more than ever before. The athletes who have trained for years, often against extreme adversity, echo the billions of individual stories across the world of people who similarly have faced life-changing challenges. Forfeiting the Olympics would be a painful symbol of defeat.


Johnny Luk is a strategic advisor, a university governor and ran for parliament in the UK as a Conservative candidate in 2019. He formerly worked on Brexit negotiations as part of the UK government and was a former junior British champion in rowing.

www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2021/5/30/the-tokyo-olympics-must-go-on

Japan Olympic Committee has tried to secure 30 hospitals in Tokyo and neighboring prefectures to handle medical care for Olympic athletes or participants who become infected with the coronavirus—but they are getting the door slammed in their face.

Biden said 'the rules are the rules' when asked about Sha'Carri Richardson's suspension for marijuana use

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Richardson said she took marijuana after she learned from a reporter that her biological mother died.



"To hear that information come from a complete stranger, it was definitely triggering. It was definitely nerve-shocking." she said on NBC's Today show. "No offense to him at all, he was just doing his job, but it put me in a state of mind of emotional panic."

"The criminalization and banning of cannabis is an instrument of racist and colonial policy," Ocasio-Cortez wrote in a post on Twitter. "The IOC should reconsider its suspension of Ms. Richardson and any athletes penalized for cannabis use."

Bach tripped over his words while addressing his Japanese hosts, referring to the “Chinese people” rather than “Japanese people” as he spoke.

“Our common target is safe and secure games for everybody; for the athletes, for all the delegations, and most importantly also for the Chinese people -- Japanese people," Bach said, catching his mistake quickly.