Tokyo (AFP)
"You have succeeded in making Tokyo the best prepared city of all time for the Olympic Games," assured the President of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) Thomas Bach on Tuesday, ten days before the opening of the Olympic Games disrupted by the pandemic .
"It is even more remarkable in the difficult circumstances that we all have to face," insisted the boss of the Olympic movement.
Draconian measures have been taken for these Games (July 23-August 8), which will take place almost entirely behind closed doors to limit the risks of the spread of Covid-19.
Mr Bach, who arrived in Japan last week and spent three days in quarantine, assured Tokyo-2020 organizing committee chairperson Seiko Hashimoto that the organizers were doing "a fantastic job."
Mr Bach and Ms Hashimoto spoke as the first athletes began to enter the Olympic Village, which opened on Tuesday without ceremony or invitation to the press.
The organizers refused to specify which teams entered the Village or how many athletes were already there.
According to very strict rules, athletes can only enter the Village five days before (with the possibility of entering up to seven days before on request to facilitate acclimatization) their events and must leave within 48 hours following the end of these.
- "Be efficient" -
Tokyo has been under a state of health emergency again since Monday, in the face of an upsurge in Covid-19 cases.
Sportsmen, coaches, officials and journalists coming from abroad will be subjected to regular screening tests and their movements will be limited.
The organizers announced last Thursday a closed session on all the events taking place in "Greater Tokyo" (more than 95% of the events of these Olympics), that is to say in the capital and three neighboring departments (Kanagawa, Saitama and Chiba).
The other Japanese departments further from Tokyo and hosting certain Olympic Games were initially to escape this fate.
But in the days that followed, local officials in Hokkaido (North) and Fukushima, in northeastern Japan hit by the 2011 earthquake, tsunami and nuclear accident, banned all audiences from Olympic football matches, baseball and softball they will host.
- Behind closed doors -
And the mayor of Sendai, in the Miyagi county next to Fukushima, has also asked organizers that the public be excluded from football matches scheduled to take place there during the Games, according to local media.
A week ago, local authorities and the organizers of the Olympics also called on the public to refrain from attending the marathon and walking events scheduled for early August in Sapporo, the capital of the island of Hokkaido.
The Olympic events should therefore only take place in the presence of a small audience (50% of the capacity of the competition venue, up to a limit of 10,000 people) in the departments of Ibaraki, north of Tokyo, where only the school children will be admitted, and in that of Shizuoka (center).
Polls have consistently shown in recent months that most Japanese would have preferred the Games to be postponed again, as in 2020, or simply canceled.
These new closed doors, however, make people of northeastern Japan fear that the message of "reconstruction" of their region, associated with these Olympics since their attribution in Tokyo in 2013, is eclipsed by the health measures of the Games which have become those " of the pandemic ".
© 2021 AFP