Abstract
This essay aims to document how world sport has changed since Covid. It is based on an ethnography conducted during the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. Using field research in Japan, it seeks to highlight the challenges in Olympics coverage going forward while also arguing that Covid has meant the media must be much more focused and knowledgeable to be able to cover the Games well.
Keywords:
This was my fourth Olympic Games as a broadcast journalist and may I say it was the hardest to cover. Covid has fundamentally changed world sport and the Tokyo 2020 Games was evidence how and why. Whether it is for the better or for worse is not the subject matter of this essay. Rather, what I wish to do in the next few pages is analyse how things have changed. In trying to do so, I will use my field work in Tokyo to articulate the changes and explain how the Olympics or rather every mega sports event set to be organised in future will be fundamentally different from what transpired in a pre-Covid world.
The build-up
Never has the build up to an Olympic Games been as torturous as this one. The amount of paperwork that needed to be done was humungous and many would have given up wanting to travel to the games because of the difficulties associated in completing the paperwork.Footnote1 The organisers were equally confused to start with and no email was answered on time.Footnote2 In fact, for weeks in May–June there was no answer adding to the anxiety. The officials had mandated that each journalist would need his or her activity planFootnote3 approved before travel in mid-July and only then would the immigration process in Tokyo be smooth. In my case, the approval finally came as I was about to board my flight for Tokyo on 19 July from New Delhi.Footnote4 There was a huge backlog and in multiple emails the organisers apologised for the problems encountered by media from across the world. To add to the paperwork, multiple apps had to be mandatorily downloaded before travel and health records uploaded.Footnote5 Finally, one had to carry a negative RTPCR Test report taken within 72 hours of travel, failing which he or she wouldn’t be allowed to board the flight for Tokyo.
If this was all the pre departure rigour, on arrival in Tokyo journalists from red list countries like IndiaFootnote6 where the Covid case load was high had to serve a mandatory three days hard quarantine and then get tested every day for the first eight days and every third day thereafter. If you missed a Test, your health app, OCHA, would show a red ‘Not Cleared’ sign, which meant you wouldn’t be permitted to visit a single games venue or a restaurant or eatery. In case the Test result was negative, the organisers wouldn’t inform you about it. However, if the result was positive or inconclusive you would get an email saying so and would immediately have to go into isolation for a period of two weeks.
In the case of athletes’ the protocol was somewhat different. India’s Paralympics athletes experienced it when six of them had to be isolated having come into close contact with a Covid positive case on the flight to Tokyo on 18 August 2021. India had to change the flag bearer at the very last minute when Rio Paralympics gold medal winner and designated flag bearer Mariappan Thangavelu was asked to isolate for two weeks. Mariappan and the other Indian athletes were, however, allowed to train individually and with regular RTPCR Tests being conducted, at no point was their participation under threat. Each of the six close contacts were, however, put in separate rooms and assigned separate vehicles so that they wouldn’t come in contact with any other member of the contingent. While it was extremely hard on the athletes, this was the only way the organisers could minimise risk of infection inside the athletes’ village.
It was all very different
The difference from the earlier games started at the airport itself. Soon after you landed in Tokyo smiling volunteers flashed signs asking if you had downloaded the OCHA health app. If you had, you could advance yourself in the queue and go to the Covid testing room. That’s where you are told to spit into a cylindrical container and submit your sample. Thereafter you are asked to move upstairs to a huge waiting area and asked to keep looking at a giant screen where your number was to flash if you tested negative for Covid. In my case my number was 3032. Dr Narendra Batra, President of the Indian Olympic Association (IOA) was 3030 and Sania Mirza, India’s leading tennis player, was 3031. IOA Secretary General Rajeev Mehta was 3035. While 3030, 3031 and 3035 all appeared within seconds of each other, mine did not. Many seated alongside were asking me to stay calm but in that minute and a half of delay I could have lost years of my life! What if my number did not appear and I had returned an inconclusive sample? Would that mean I’d have to isolate and miss the games? Thankfully the number flashed in a minute and I was handed my pink slip, which denoted a negative Test, and asked to proceed to immigration. Thereafter the process was smooth and I reached my hotel within an hour and a half.
The journey to the hotel wasn’t without surprises either. First a group of us, media, who had arrived at the same time were taken to the central bus terminus from where we were assigned individual taxis to get to our hotels. There were two of us from Kolkata and we were both booked in the same hotel. We had travelled together from India and all of a sudden were asked to use separate taxis. We had exposure all through the journey so what was the logic in separating us for the last few minutes of the journey? Why waste resources when the taxi could have been assigned to another person? However, the organisers wouldn’t listen to anything that wasn’t prescribed in the rulebook. As a result, we had to board two separate taxis to get to our hotel, the Shinagawa Prince, in Minato City.
That’s where the next round of problems started. I was to be in quarantine for three days and not expected to leave the hotel unless it was an emergency. In fact, to leave the room was also an issue. The only way I could submit my Covid sample everyday was if the testing kits were delivered to me in my room and thereafter if someone came to pick them up. I made several calls to inform the Covid Liaison team that I needed Test kits and also help to provide my test sample. Unless I was able to submit my sample, I would get a negative mark in my health app and it could cause trouble at the end of my quarantine. However, no one was available to take the call. Nor was there any Covid help team in the hotel. Secondly, even when the call was picked up at the other end, most of the operators did not speak English. Finally, even if one informed the operator about the requirement and it was made note of, no one turned up to collect the sample.Footnote7 That’s where I felt the world media is discriminatory towards countries like India. Had this been in Delhi for example we would have been castigated and taken to task. India doesn’t work, people are inefficient, most people in India do not have any sense of discipline would have been the rhetoric the world over.
In comparison with the 2010 Commonwealth Games, for example, hundreds of articles were published in newspapers across the world mentioning that the Delhi CWG had resulted in thousands of poor being evicted and displaced to sanitise and gentrify Delhi’s urban space. Multi discipline games can’t favour the rich and any instance of class discrimination should be highlighted and reported. However, in downtown Tokyo, people were evicted from their shelters and asked to move away on account of the Olympic games. This pre-Covid measure was continued even with no spectators at the venues and very limited number of people traveling to Japan. Clearly, this was done to shield Japan’s sordid underbelly from the gaze of the world media. While a handful of local media published the story, I did not see a single global headline on the matter. Similarly, I did not see many talk about the plight of media trying to follow rules but getting very little help from the organisers in doing so. We are always told about Japanese efficiency. My experience was mixed at best. While the airport was indeed well organised, the experience thereafter was poor. The health app did not work, the collection teams did not come on time, the phone numbers rarely worked and most importantly it was a challenge to communicate. Google translate doesn’t really work on the phone and you are left stranded trying to explain what you are trying to suggest.
The worst experience was with trying to book taxis in Tokyo. During the first 14 days we weren’t allowed to use public transport and all that we had access to were the media buses. The organisers in trying to further help ease the pressure had given each journalist 14 taxi vouchers to be used in the first 14 days in Japan. These were designated taxis, which had partnered the Tokyo 2020 games. The vouchers included a booklet listing phone numbers of taxi companies. Of the 50 companies listed, 5 were English speaking while the rest were all Japanese speaking operators. Each time I called an English speaking line the wait was close to 45 minutes irrespective of the time of the day and it was better to avail the media bus rather than wait for a taxi!! If I wanted to book a taxi for the following day and felt a call at midnight would help do so, the wait time remained the same making the task that much more difficult. Finally, if I did manage to book the operator would end the call saying they would call back 20 minutes before the journey with the designated car number. Now, several times, I was in the middle of an event in a venue when the call came from the taxi company and in such a situation it was impossible to attend to the call. It resulted in my booking getting cancelled a couple of times causing me immense trouble and annoyance.
It was key not to lose patience for this was the Covid edition of the Olympic Games. Despite all of these problems, I was looking forward to the action between 24 July and 8 August. As an Indian journalist, I was excited to report on the performances of a talented contingent that had raised hopes of winning more medals than the six medals the country won in London 2012. In addition, I found it fascinating to be able to cover the Covid edition of the Olympics.
Galleries without fans
The absence of fans from the stadium started out as an issue of great difficulty for sports broadcasters in capturing the emotional resonance associated with sport. Fans make a stadium come alive with their antics and emotions. They are committed to teams, individual athletes, and stadiums in a way that gives them a social identity. Sport, it was universally accepted, meant little without its fans.
As Uday Shankar, a key figure in the television broadcast space had instructively suggested, ‘At the moment there are strict rules that govern coverage. However, in a scenario where we don’t have fans in stadiums it is time to think if we can make coverage more attractive and more creative. That way fans will be exposed to raw emotions real time, which they have seen in recent documentaries’. What Shankar was pointing to was heightened disruption to existing coverage norms. If cameras are allowed in dressing rooms for example fans will all of a sudden have access to locker room talk and see how players react in critical situations. Such innovations can certainly add a lot to coverage taking broadcast to the next level of interactivity and engagement.
We did see a lot of these disruptions in Tokyo. First, the main Olympic stadium was arranged in a manner that it seemed there were people in the stands. When I first entered the stadium, it seemed to be bustling with activity. The colour coding in the seats left the impression of fans making the noise! In reality the broadcast control room integrated fan chants into the broadcast and anyone who consumed the coverage wouldn’t really miss fan presence to start with. The presence of volunteers, athletes and media helped and the reactions from them acted as a substitute for fan emotion in the stadium. It is somewhat embarrassing to say that my own visual of dancing in the aisles when the Indian hockey team won bronze went viral in India and was sent to me by hundreds of friends. It was a spontaneous reaction and I wasn’t aware it would be captured by the television cameras. The moment was pure joy and each one of us present soaked it all in, exactly what sport forces you to do in such situations.
For the Indian sports media Tokyo has given work a very different meaning. A poor Olympics would have been a death blow for Indian sport and also for the sports media. During Covid sports journalists have taken a huge hit. With sports coming to a standstill the world over, most media organisations decided to cut down on sports desks and made sports journalists redundant. The organisations that did not, pushed many to take pay cuts. Some channels don’t do sport and prefer to do political debates on prime time television all through the year.
With the country getting behind the hockey teams and individual athletes, media organisations had little option but to turn their focus to sport. Except a handful who retained decent sports desks, others failed miserably. For example some journalists ended up interviewing kho kho coaches at the National stadium thinking they were hockey coaches! These coaches had no idea why they were being interviewed but enjoyed the limelight. All of a sudden every channel wanted a piece of Manpreet Singh and Rani Rampal, captain of the men’s and women’s hockey teams. Every news anchor who did prime time shows started to take an interest in hockey and the Olympics. We must, as sports fans, writers, journalists and scholars, sustain this momentum.
On ground difficulties
PV Sindhu, India’s ace badminton player, had just won her second Olympic medal and the few Indian journalists in the stands at the Musashino Forest Sports Plaza were understandably ecstatic. Indians rarely win Olympic medals and Sindhu remains an exception with back to back medals at the world’s highest sporting stage. It is natural that we asked her out for a detailed television interview after the win. As a norm the winning athlete come out with the traveling media and does interviews after the dope Test is over. We had planned the same for Sindhu but the organisers asked her to return to the athlete’s room the moment she came out of dope and not meet with any one of us. Sindhu was more shocked than I was and literally pleaded with the organisers that she needed to help us out. She was aware of the pressure journalists are under and has always gone out of her way to support. While the organisers were respectful of who she was, they did not allow her to breach the Covid protocols put in place by the government of Japan. ‘You can’t return to the athletes’ village if you go with him’, was the stern message that went out to her. By that time the newsroom back in India was in panic, continuously asking me when the interview was coming. After much persuasion, Sindhu was allowed to do a print interview in the press conference room with an official ensuring there was a six feet distance between us! I would ask the question holding my phone close to my mouth so that it was properly recorded, sanitise it, and pass it on to Sindhu. She would answer the question, do the same drill and pass it back to me. We were double vaccinated, yet the organisers weren’t willing to take a chance. She left for the village and I got on the media bus for my hotel only to get off midway at the Main Press Center once she messaged. We eventually recorded the interview at 3am in the morning Tokyo time from the middle of the road on a zoom call! Tokyo has been the most difficult Olympic games to cover but probably this is why the organisers managed to pull it off. Despite all the doomsday predictions, Covid cases among Olympic stakeholders- officials, athletes, contracted staff and media, never exceeded the 0.02 percent positivity mark and the games went through largely unscathed as a result.
Rules which need to be reconsidered
Athletes were allowed to interact with the press in the mixed zone. While every person present was masked and organisers were tasked to enforce the mask mandate, the distance between the athlete and the media was at no point more than six feet. For some sports like Boxing, the mixed zone wasn’t in a ventilated area either. After every bout, boxers would come to the mixed done where there were cubicles for print and audio visual journalists to stand and conduct their interviews. There was a chance that the cubicle surfaces were not sanitised after every bout. I have to confess I found this arrangement strange. If interviews could be conducted in a badly ventilated space, why would an athlete be stopped from walking out with journalists to an open outdoor area and have a chat? Every research has shown that outdoors are safer than a closed indoor space and this is one rule the IOC must relook at going forward. Also, organisers were often unsure if an athlete was allowed to walk out or not. While in badminton, Sindhu wasn’t allowed to step out by the organizers, in boxing Mary Kom, one of India’s greatest stars, was allowed to walk out of the venue premises with TV journalists and do interviews on the last day of her competition. Mary was coming to the end of what has been a glittering career and some of the officials present were aware this was a sentimental moment for her and for all the journalists present from India. Whatever the reason may have been, he allowed Mary to step out of the venue and speak to television journalists while maintaining the mandated distance and thereafter board the athletes bus to the Games village. Strictly speaking this was an infringement. Having said that, it was a very thin line with several venues like boxing and table tennis permitting athletes to interact with the process while badminton and athletics refusing permission to do so. The playbook too was slightly unclear on this. It was subject to interpretation what the athlete could or could not do. While interviews in the village plaza was prohibited because of Covid, brief interactions right outside the venue precinct soon after the event was over wasn’t dealt with in any detail.
Renewed consciousness: the paralympics
It has never occurred that two Indians draped in the tricolour have celebrated winning medals at an Olympic stadium in front of a near packed crowd. It was to this rarity that the country woke up to on Saturday 10 September 2016 in Rio when Mariappan Thangavelu and Varun Bhati won the gold and bronze in the high jump in the Paralympics. And in what was yet another huge moment for India, Deepa Malik followed up with a silver in the shot put on 13 September throwing 4.61 meters, a personal best for her. Finally, it was Devendra Jhajharia with his second Paralympic gold who ensured India rounded it off rather superbly in Brazil.Footnote8
However, compared to the national outpouring of emotion in the aftermath of the bronze won by Sakshi Malik and silver won by PV Sindhu, the reaction to the gold, silver and bronze in the Para Games was at best muted in the country. While the athletes were celebrated in social media by the ordinary Indian sports fan, politicians who joined the bandwagon in the Sakshi-Sindhu aftermath mostly kept away. State governments too, and in this case many of them who declared rewards for the two girls and justly so, were also silent.
This is what changed in Tokyo. From the way para athletes were given a send off to the number of sponsors who came forward, Paralympics in India is finally getting its due largely because of the changes brought in by Covid. You don’t really need to send teams to cover a games. With technology it can be done sitting at home and on digital platforms. Technology has empowered the fan and as a result sports consumption now has a very different meaning.
It is essential to state in this context that our treatment of para athletes will go a long away to defining us as a ‘people’ and will tell the world what kind of a society we are. Are we celebrating our para athletes enough or are we still going to discriminate between Olympians and Paralympians?
In the West para athletes have for long been accorded the same respect as the Olympians. Medal winners have been feted in the same manner and the para games receive similar prominence in the media. India, however, have tended to neglect para athletes, invested little in facilities that will encourage them to take up sport and done very little to decorate them and turn them into national icons. Such a mindset betrays the very ideals of equality and civil liberty that the country stands for and the Tokyo Paralympics emerged as a major platform in transforming this trend. Each of the 54 athletes who participated have demonstrated that never was it about facilities and infrastructure as it is often made out to be. It was always about will and the determination to succeed. It was about the burning desire to make the country proud.
Conclusion
Sport and its consumption has fundamentally changed in the last year and a half. While on the one hand things have become more democratic and has empowered fans, on the other hand the job of the sports media has become far more difficult and problematic. Innovation is the key and one needs to be far more well networked to get the job done. In Rio you need not know an athlete well to do the interview. It was assumed that athletes would talk to every journalist present in the aftermath of the event. Not so in Tokyo. The athlete talked if he or she knew you well enough and was aware of your corpus of work. In the absence of physical interviews, being well networked was of critical importance and may well define the future of sports journalism going forward.
What Tokyo has also taught us is that mega spectacles can be organised with proper protocols in place. All through the Olympics and Paralympics Tokyo registered anywhere between 4000–5000 Covid cases every day. Yet the events went on interrupted and may well be a pointer for the future. In Paris, expected to be staged in a Covid contained world, we will see a hybrid model emerge – take the best of the past and merge it with the learnings from the new normal. In that sense Tokyo will forever remain a watershed.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 Paperwork had started in March and almost every week a new requirement was mentioned. And things kept changing with Covid continuing to overwhelm health systems in some parts of the world. To keep pace with paperwork at such changing and challenging times was seriously problematic.
2 On one occasion I had to send eleven reminders to try and elicit a response and this was actually documented by me in my emails!
3 A detailed document on where you were likely to go and which events you were most likely to cover at the Games.
4 I remember uploading documents on the app as the flight was taxiing for that’s when I got this email from the organisers confirming approval of the activity plan.
5 Among the apps were OCHA, COCOA and Icon, which wasn’t an app but a web account.
6 There were 10 plus red list countries at the time of the start of the Games on 24 July.
7 It happened with me on day two.
8 India won 4 Paralympics medals in Rio 2016, 2 golds, 1 silver and 1 bronze.