The Olympics will be downsized this year

After first barring overseas spectators from attending the Tokyo Olympics and Paralympics due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Japanese government and the Summer Games’ Organizing Committee have decided to bar overseas athletes as well.

“The fact that they are not able to attend the Games from abroad, that is both disappointing and regrettable,” Seiko Hashimoto, president of the organizing committee, said during a news conference.

“However, the reduced competition is likely to enable us to regain the glory we achieved some time ago, what with the exclusion of the colonialists and the commies – excuse me, I meant the United States and Russia – and the rest of the world,” Hashimoto added, failing to suppress a giggle.

Japan finished third in gold medals in 1964 and ’68, behind the USA and USSR. But since then, it has pretty much been an also-ran in the Summer Games, and has never finished in the top five in the Winter Olympics.

“By keeping the Americans out of our water this year, I think we can really load up on the gold,” said Daiyo Seto, Japan’s first-ever double world champion swimmer and captain of its national team. “Y’know, the average American male is 5-foot-9 and the average Japanese man is 5-6 and at the end of a race those three inches in the Olympic pool are the difference between gold and garbage.”

The Tokyo Summer Games were originally scheduled for 2020 but when then-President Donald Trump demanded a place on the United States team as a member of the artistic swimming and trampoline gymnastics events, Japan’s then-Prime Minister, Shinzo Abe, canceled the Olympics.

He said permitting “an egotistical, moronic, narcissistic, incompetent, unqualified, lying – have I left anything out? Oh, yes, bullying – despot-in-training would violate all the virtues of bushido.

“The image I had of an enraged orange water buffalo thrashing about whenever I closed my eyes to go to sleep was just too much for me and, I’m sure, would have been for the rest of the nation as well,” Abe said. “I felt the only honorable thing to do was delay the competition until Fatso-San was no longer a factor.”

It was, in fact, the second time a Tokyo Olympics had been canceled. The Games of the XII Olympiad, scheduled for September 21-October 6, 1940, were called off due to what Hirohito, Japan’s emperor at the time, later referred to as “that unpleasantness in Europe and elsewhere.”