Barely hours after banning fans from attending the Olympics, Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga announced that athletes would be banned from Tokyo venues as well.
“The Games will go on,” he said, “but in various forms. Some competition will be, um, altered somewhat to protect the competitors’ health and some will be held at alternate sites.”
Suga initially declined to define what “altered” meant, but under intense questioning he said some events would involve computers and others would be animated.
“Look,” Suga said, “the International Olympic Committee makes $3-billion, maybe $4-billion in broadcast rights, about 75 percent of its income, and if we canceled the games entirely the IOC would sue the crap out of us and I think The Hague – what do they call it? The World Court? – would side with them and bankrupt us. I mean, we’re still trying to live down that unpleasantness from 80 years ago.”
Kyoto-based Nintendo, the oldest and largest computer-game company, said it will conduct the majority of the competition, including swimming, diving and track-and-field, with athletes competing on Game Boy, Famicom and Wii consoles while confined to their homes.
Suga, his wife Mariko, and their three adult sons have a major stake in Nintendo and undoubtedly will profit handsomely from the company’s Olympic involvement.
“That’s not why we’re doing this,” the prime minister told CBS Senior Foreign Affairs Correspondent Margaret Brennan. “I mean, until recently I admired your former president’s financial acumen, but I didn’t plan any of this.”
The basketball competition will be split between Konami’s Double Dribble and, surprisingly, Barkley Shut Up and Jam! “Hey, the Round Mound of Rebound is a funny guy,” Suga said. “And with all this mess, we could use a good laugh.”
The five cycling events, as well as skateboarding, will be conducted on adapted versions of Grand Theft Auto.
And in a controversial decision that may be revisited, Suga said the Olympic football (soccer) competition, normally held July 21 through August 7, will be a one-day event, date to be determined, with all men’s teams simultaneously playing a modified version of Mortal Kombat and the women’s teams competing on an adapted Lara Croft GO.
Because artistic gymnastics, rhythmic gymnastics, trampoline gymnastics, marathon swimming and artistic swimming “are considered a joke by anyone not actually doing it,” Tokyo Olympic Organizing Committee President Seiko Hashimoto said, “we’re just going to have Toei Animation throw together a bunch of anime videos of that stuff in its Ohizumi Studio in Nerima City and show them whenever nothing else is going on. Like, who’s going to know or even care, right?”
Not all of the dates, sites and forms of competition have been finalized, Hashimoto said, “but I’ll tell you one thing: I’m never going to get involved in anything like this again. I mean, the Olympics sounds so grand and all but it’s a freaking money pit.
“Maybe I shouldn’t say this, considering I’m running the whole Tokyo committee,” Hashimoto added, “but if I could, I’d take out policies on the stadium, the aquatics center, the gymnastics center, Budokan, Kokugikan … all of them, then blow them the hell up.”
Because Nintendo also is the majority owner of the American League Seattle Mariners, the July 29-August 7 baseball and softball competition will be held live at T-Mobile Park in Seattle, with no limited seating, while the Mariners are on the road.
Other live competition – “although ‘live’ is a relative and maybe temporary term,” Suga said – will include archery, fencing and shooting at Mexican venues in Tijuana, Acapulco, Juarez and Irapuato, plus downtown Detroit. The Ellipse near the U.S. Capitol was withdrawn as a site following the presidential election.
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