TheWall Street Journal, in “Strains of Tokyo’s Pandemic Olympics,” noted that Biles’s exit “followed a stunning defeat for Japanese tennis player Naomi Osaka in the third round of the women’s singles tournament. Osaka … has also cited the mental toll of her profession.” "A combination of the restrictive conditions, absent fans, sweltering heat, and a one-year delay that threw off finely-tuned training cycles has dimmed the star power, in Japan and the U.S., of an Olympics already struggling for global appeal.”
While the IOC officially proclaims its mission to be the building of “a peaceful and better world in theOlympic Spiritwhich requires mutual understanding with a spirit of friendship, solidarity and fair play,” the quadrennial event is dominated by bitter nationalist rivalries, with militarist connotations, and each country’s establishment takes the opportunity of the games to incite chauvinism and xenophobia.
The CBC in Canada, BBC in Britain and other national media outlets are all culpable in this regard, but it is hard to imagine any broadcaster outdoing NBC in the US in the flag-waving department. The network shamefully concentrates its coverage and commentary on the exploits of “Team USA.” Viewers are inundated with images of and stories about American athletes, to the exclusion of nearly everyone else, and then pollsters discover, surprise, that 82 percent of respondents will be “rooting for athletes from the US.”
In fact, there is no “natural” or innate reason why American viewers should be any less interested in performances by Korean, Brazilian, Iranian, German, Russian or Chinese athletes, except that they are largely prevented from doing so.
The hypocrisy, tied to warmongering, of theNew York Timesknows no bounds. On July 29, theTimesposted an article, “The Chinese Sports Machine’s Single Goal: The Most Golds, at Any Cost,” arguing that China’s “sports assembly line is designed for one purpose: churning out gold medals for the glory of the nation.” This in a country where thuggish cries of “USA! USA! USA!” began ringing out in the 1980s and have never stopped. Billions and billions are spent on sports and sports promotion in the US and the principle of “bread and circuses.”
