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Tokyo 2020. In 2021. We started badly with the mess of numbers.

The presentation was not very lively either: the curtain opened a year later than planned and without an audience.

It was the Games of the protests of the citizens of the host country.

Those who were going to open a new post-pandemic era.

But the only thing they opened was a can full of fears of a big outbreak that would force them to cancel everything.

Japan had an enormous challenge: to carry out the Pandemic Games.

And he has succeeded.

Of course there have been chaotic moments, with many improvisations and corrections on the fly.

But it must be recognized that the three bubbles around which everything worked (that of the athletes, journalists and volunteers of the organization), have worked.

The Japanese will always be left with the thorn of not knowing how their Games would have been held in a world without Covid.

"The infrastructure and the operation they had was incredible. They would have been the best in history,"

Thomas Bach

, president of the International Olympic Committee (IOC)

, told a group of journalists a few days ago

.

Surely Bach is right.

But we are not here to talk about things that have never happened.

In these lines of review, it must be said that Bach himself had to deal with shouts and insults from a group of protesters who asked him to cancel the Games on a trip to Hiroshima.

Badosa, retired in a wheelchair

There have been protests since the Olympic torch began traveling through Japan in March.

Even a lady named

Kayoko Takahashi

tried to put out the flame with a squirt gun.

On the night of the opening ceremony, an angry mob gathered outside the Olympic Stadium.

There were times when their screams were heard more than the music from the stadium.

In the midst of a fourth state of emergency and a fifth wave of infections that broke new records every day, the Japanese, who were not in for much of a party, turned their backs on their Games.

Although it is also true that, as the competitions progressed and Japan was winning medals, more people were hooked and the protests lost force until they were somewhat marginal.

Paula Badosa, retired in wheelchair.REUTERS

Tokyo 2020, in addition to the sanitary lock, will be remembered for being the hottest Games in history.

Ask the Spanish tennis player

Paula Badosa

, who had to retire in a wheelchair due to heatstroke.

More than 34 degrees for a few days and a humidity of almost 70% caused a scare like the one in Badosa.

The tennis players were the ones who complained the most.

In the memorandum, there should be the phrase that the Russian

Daniil Medvedev

gave

to the referee during a match: "If I die, will you be responsible?"

Medvedev did not die of heat, but lost the match.

Caught while sightseeing

Outside the sports arena, these atypical Games have also left bizarre moments such as the disappearance for four days of

Julius Ssekitoleko

, the Ugandan weightlifter who left his delegation hanging and hid in the north, in the city of Yokkaichi.

Before his escape, he left a note explaining that he wanted to work in Japan.

He was not very successful because he ended up deported.

Other expelled from the country were two Georgian athletes who left the Olympic Village to do some sightseeing in the center of Tokyo, bypassing the rigid restrictions of the organization.

What

Lasha Shavdatuashvili and Vazha Margvelashvili

, both Olympic medalists, did not have is that some citizens recognized them and told the police that two athletes had escaped from the bubble.

Tsimanouskaya, escorted by the Japanese police.REUTERS

Less funny was what happened to the Belarusian

Krystsina Tsimanouskaya

.

The clutches of an authoritarian government tried to operate with impunity at the Olympics.

It would not be the first time it happens.

But if Japan is not suspicious of something, it is of being one of the healthiest democrats on the planet.

Sprinter Tsimanouskaya criticized her coaches and

Aleksándr Lukashenko's

regime

attempted forcible deportation.

She described it as a "kidnapping".

The 2022 Winter Games

Fortunately, her Japanese story had a happy ending: the police interceded when the athlete was already at the airport.

Tsimanouskaya applied for asylum and the Polish government granted it.

Already exiled in Poland, she said that even the doctor in her delegation suggested that she commit suicide.

The strangest Olympic Games ever held have come to an end.

Now, before Paris 2024, it is Beijing's turn to take the baton with its Winter Games in February 2022. It will be the third consecutive Olympic event in Asia.

China wants, if the new outbreaks give it a break, that in its Games there will be an audience in the stands.

He wants to do what Tokyo failed: celebrate the first big party of the post-pandemic era.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

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