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Old Posted Jul 26, 2021, 3:16 PM
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Japan's Olympic organizers lied about its weather, and now athletes are paying the pr

I was wondering why they chose this time of year, actually---I know that when Tokyo last hosted the Summer Olympics in 1964, they were actually held in October, precisely to avoid the high heat and humidity of mid-summer, and to avoid typhoon season.

From Yahoo News:

Japan's Olympic organizers lied about its weather, and now athletes are paying the price

Dan Wetzel·Columnist
Sun, July 25, 2021, 6:06 PM


The scene at the finish line of the men's triathlon looked like a battlefield, with athletes seemingly overcome by the intense heat in Tokyo.

TOKYO — The finish line of the men’s triathlon Monday morning looked something like a battlefield scene, bodies sprawled out on ground, trainers coming to the aid of overheated athletes, even a few being helped off with their arms draped over shoulders.

This despite the Olympics moving the start time to 6:30 a.m. in an effort to beat the heat that, as these Tokyo Games have proven, remains undefeated. Temps still reached 85 degrees with a relative humidity of 67.1 percent at start time.

No, the Japanese don’t have to apologize for the weather here — the searing sun, the sky high temps, the pea-soup humidity. No one tells Mother Nature what to do.

But as athletes continue to wilt and wither in these conditions, they do owe everyone an apology for this much: They lied like hell about it.

“With many days of mild and sunny weather, this period provides an ideal climate for athletes to perform their best.”

This quote comes from Japan’s official proposal to host the 2020 Summer Olympics.

Mild? Ideal? Here in Tokyo in July?

“I wasn’t enjoying it at all,” Russian tennis player Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova said after competing Saturday in conditions that have caused everyone from archers, to volunteers to officials to faint.

Daytime temps have hit the mid to upper 90s, with dew points in the mid-70s, a mix that assures triple digit heat indexes. This is a tropical location. Venues such as tennis, beach volleyball, cycling and others are open and exposed.

“Playing in extreme heat and humidity, it’s very challenging,” said Serbian tennis star Novak Djokovic. “It’s something we’ve known coming into Tokyo, we heard and expected the conditions would be very tough, but before you come here and experience that, you don’t really know how difficult it is.”

These are, literally, the finest athletes in the world. When they say it’s difficult, it’s difficult. So why did the Japanese claim otherwise? And why did the International Olympic Committee, in granting the bid without comment about the conditions to come, just let them say it?

“Meteorological conditions during the proposed Games-time would be reasonable,” Japan’s proposal promised.

Every athlete has to deal with the same situation, so it’s not fair to say it’s unfair. However, when you’ve trained your entire life to compete in the Olympics, you probably expect a situation that might optimize performance, not punish it.

Japan knew it was lying. They live here. Not a single resident of Tokyo would describe mid-summer here as “mild” or “ideal.” In 2014, soon after the city was awarded the bid, a column in Japan Times wondered how in the world this was going to even work.

“I have been to Manila, Bangkok, Jakarta, Phnom Penh and Singapore in mid-summer and in my experience Tokyo is the worst of them all,” author Robert Whiting wrote. “The only conceivable places that are worse would be staging the games in, say, Death Valley, California, or the Horn of Africa.”

Death Valley 2036? Don’t give the IOC any ideas.

Tokyo is, depending how you measure it, the largest city in the world, with a metro population of over 34 million. It is modern, friendly, beautiful and clean. It’s an incredible place. Except for this time of year.

And they knew it, but claimed otherwise anyway, even boasting they’d provide a place “where athletes can perform at their best.”

The last time Tokyo hosted the Summer Games was 1964. It was held in October to avoid just these kinds of conditions. That made sense.

Well, Japan is 3.6 degrees warmer now on average, per government figures. The number of days hitting 95 or above have gone from an average of one per year to 12. In both 2018 and 2020, it reached a record 106, part of heat waves that saw hundreds pass away.

The good news so far is it hasn’t gotten that bad.

“It would be very hard to have business as usual,” said Carl Parker, a storm specialist for the Weather Channel. “At these levels, athletes are really energized and they start to sweat. The body uses evaporation to cool itself off, but that’s not nearly as effective which is why it perspires even more.”

The Summer Games start between mid-July and late-August now because these months produce far higher television ratings around much of the world. That’s especially true in the United States, when NBC doesn’t have to compete with the NFL, college football, the start of the school year or much else.

Since money always talks with the IOC, here we are. Athlete concerns might have mattered back in 1964. That was then. This is billions.

So Japan put out a bid with a farcical vision of idyllic summer days, like a soft breeze through Northern Wisconsin. And the IOC just pretended not to notice and nodded right along with it.

“What [is] the penalty, if any, for false advertising,” the Japan Times wondered almost a decade ago.

Whatever it is, it appears it’s the athletes who are paying it.

Link: https://sports.yahoo.com/japan-lied-...010612634.html
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  #2  
Old Posted Jul 26, 2021, 3:42 PM
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I assume they chose this time of year, largely bc no one in U.S. would watch it in the Fall? Football season.

Do people still care about the Olympics? It seemed like a huge deal when I was a kid, and now seems to have dropped off the radar.
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Old Posted Jul 26, 2021, 3:57 PM
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Tokyo put this bid together a decade ago, so maybe they were telling the truth about the weather at the time.
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  #4  
Old Posted Jul 26, 2021, 4:04 PM
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If the IOC was stupid enough not to know that Tokyo’s weather in summer is similar to Washington DC, or at least check the Wikipedia page, then you can’t blame the organisers for trying to sell their city.

More generally I think the Olympics are a great event but need to be done in a way that isn’t such a permanent money pit. Just have 6 rotating host cities, one on each inhabited continent (or maybe combine Asia/Australia and give them 2 out of every 6 olympiads, with most going to Asian cities, so that Australia hosts like every 12th rather than every 6th games). Or even double that number and have 12 permanent hosts, but not more than that. This would mean each of these cities would host every 48 years, and even that is probably outside of the useful life of most athletic facilities.
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Old Posted Jul 26, 2021, 4:09 PM
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Just stage it in Athens every four years.

Or just cancel it already. It's a cynical money grab where competing parties routinely use cash, jewelry and sex bribes. Performance-enhancing cheating is rampant. All the sports can have periodic world championships; no need to compete under an Olympics umbrella.
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Old Posted Jul 26, 2021, 4:13 PM
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Originally Posted by 10023 View Post
If the IOC was stupid enough not to know that Tokyo’s weather in summer is similar to Washington DC, or at least check the Wikipedia page, then you can’t blame the organisers for trying to sell their city.

More generally I think the Olympics are a great event but need to be done in a way that isn’t such a permanent money pit. Just have 6 rotating host cities, one on each inhabited continent (or maybe combine Asia/Australia and give them 2 out of every 6 olympiads, with most going to Asian cities, so that Australia hosts like every 12th rather than every 6th games). Or even double that number and have 12 permanent hosts, but not more than that. This would mean each of these cities would host every 48 years, and even that is probably outside of the useful life of most athletic facilities.
If they aren't going to do at large bids anymore, they should just have the summer games in Athens every four years. They could put the winter games in Switzerland or something.
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  #7  
Old Posted Jul 26, 2021, 4:43 PM
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If they aren't going to do at large bids anymore, they should just have the summer games in Athens every four years. They could put the winter games in Switzerland or something.
Would people be salty or would it not be a huge loss? Historically that's where it was anyway, so I'm sold. Plus how many of them have actually been "successful" and not a huge waste of land and money? Also running in the humidity...wtf
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Old Posted Jul 26, 2021, 4:55 PM
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Would people be salty or would it not be a huge loss? Historically that's where it was anyway, so I'm sold. Plus how many of them have actually been "successful" and not a huge waste of land and money? Also running in the humidity...wtf
I think they have been huge economic development tools for many of the cities that have hosted them. More recently the IOC has seemed to focus and award the games to cities that aren't really in need of the increased notoriety (London, Tokyo, Paris, probably L.A., maybe Beijing). For those places hosting the games is more of a vanity project.

I personally think that if the IOC is just going to give it to superstar cities then they should just stop doing bids altogether. The bids are only interesting because of their potential to create the next Barcelona or Atlanta. Choosing New York, London, or Tokyo is lazy.
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Old Posted Jul 26, 2021, 4:55 PM
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Would people be salty or would it not be a huge loss? Historically that's where it was anyway, so I'm sold. Plus how many of them have actually been "successful" and not a huge waste of land and money? Also running in the humidity...wtf
As far as I know, the only two Olympics to turn s profit are both LA games and I suspect 2028 will as well. There probably is no other city in the world that can host the games on 1 day notice like LA. Every necessary venue is already built and with 2 large universities in the city, we never need to build a village for the athletes or the media
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Old Posted Jul 26, 2021, 5:27 PM
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As far as I know, the only two Olympics to turn s profit are both LA games and I suspect 2028 will as well. There probably is no other city in the world that can host the games on 1 day notice like LA. Every necessary venue is already built and with 2 large universities in the city, we never need to build a village for the athletes or the media
Plus LA has the perfect weather for the games with its oceanic - Mediterranean climate keeping summer temps comfortable and not humid. Being at sea level also means you don't have altitude requiring training and affecting records like the Mexico City games.

Maybe a rotating trio of LA, Athens, Perth? What would be a suitable climate in Asia?
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Old Posted Jul 26, 2021, 5:43 PM
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I can forgive them for lying or being wrong about the weather, since weather is so hard to predict and plan in advance for. If they had misled people about the climate, now that would have been unforgivable, but this is the weather we about talking about so it is understandable.
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Old Posted Jul 26, 2021, 6:03 PM
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Oh please. The summer Olympics are almost always played in hot weather. Is summer in Tokyo really that much better than Atlanta? LA can be brutally hot this time of year, London just had a big heatwave, I've been to Paris in the summer when it was VERY hot. Why is Tokyo being held to a different standard here?

And if the Olympic Committee simply trusted a disingenuous claim about the weather in Tokyo, that's on them. Anyone can google the average temperature and weather of any city in the world in a matter of seconds.
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Old Posted Jul 26, 2021, 6:28 PM
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Oh please. The summer Olympics are almost always played in hot weather. Is summer in Tokyo really that much better than Atlanta? LA can be brutally hot this time of year, London just had a big heatwave, I've been to Paris in the summer when it was VERY hot. Why is Tokyo being held to a different standard here?

And if the Olympic Committee simply trusted a disingenuous claim about the weather in Tokyo, that's on them. Anyone can google the average temperature and weather of any city in the world in a matter of seconds.
There’s nothing more cliché and annoying than b*tching about major sports events host anywhere outside the Anglosphere.

So the weather in the world’s largest metropolis is some sort of secret?

P.S. The Olympics are amazing!!!
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Old Posted Jul 26, 2021, 6:55 PM
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This is silly. It's like asking someone where they are going on vacation in 2032 if these games were planned a decade ago.

Weather sometimes can be unpredictable, even with the best models or forecasts. August 6th 1945 was supposedly going to be a 70 degree day with clear skies and than it turned out to be a million degrees.

They are athletes. Comes with the turf. Just like when Middle Eastern countries host soccer games.
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Old Posted Jul 26, 2021, 7:29 PM
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Just stage it in Athens every four years.

Or just cancel it already. It's a cynical money grab where competing parties routinely use cash, jewelry and sex bribes. Performance-enhancing cheating is rampant. All the sports can have periodic world championships; no need to compete under an Olympics umbrella.
Yeah, I kind of agree.

The US is such a big country. I don't feel a connection to most of "our" professional athletes.
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Old Posted Jul 26, 2021, 7:44 PM
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Yeah, I kind of agree.

The US is such a big country. I don't feel a connection to most of "our" professional athletes.
But you don’t need to root for US athletes necessarily. I hardly ever root for the ones from my country. It’s much more fun to pick teams depending on the sport. For instance, volleyball/gymnastics I like Russia, rowing I root for Germany, cycling for Great Britain, waterpolo for Hungary, and so on.
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Old Posted Jul 26, 2021, 7:44 PM
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There’s nothing more cliché and annoying than b*tching about major sports events host anywhere outside the Anglosphere.

So the weather in the world’s largest metropolis is some sort of secret?

P.S. The Olympics are amazing!!!
It's not just outside of the Anglosphere. The U.S. media makes sport out of critiquing Olympic preparations. They even criticized London quite a bit.
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Old Posted Jul 26, 2021, 7:50 PM
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Yeah, I kind of agree.

The US is such a big country. I don't feel a connection to most of "our" professional athletes.
It was a big deal when we had to destroy the Soviets at every winter and summer sport but that challenge is long gone and China is boring sports rival. I remember the 1984 Olympics as a kid and the patriotism towards the US team was huge. Cars, cameras, watches, cereal, etc all had US Olympic logos.
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Old Posted Jul 26, 2021, 7:59 PM
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The "us vs. them" focus doesn't seem like it brings the world together. Part of me wants the US to excel, but when I think about it maybe it's better when the medals are spread out more.

As for the weather/climate, most of the world sucks for sports in the summer. Not my city, which wouldn't go for an Olympics, but most of it.
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Old Posted Jul 26, 2021, 8:01 PM
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There’s nothing more cliché and annoying than b*tching about major sports events host anywhere outside the Anglosphere.
You must not have been around during the Atlanta 1996 Olympics, which were generally seen as a poorly run Olympics, especially by the IOC. I'm not even talking about the Olympic Park bombing. The American media kind of downplayed it, but the media outside the US were all talking about the logistical problems that the Atlanta Olympics had. There were bus drivers literally getting lost taking athletes to their competitions; some even missed them. And the IOC hated the overly commercial Olympic vendor sites everywhere and "carnival atmosphere." There were also computer glitches and issues with accessibility with the international press.

Here's an old article from the Washington Post about the athlete transportation problems during the Atlanta Games: https://www.washingtonpost.com/archi...-7477bb485fce/
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