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Post by Admin on Jul 13, 2021 19:11:29 GMT
TOKYO -- IOC president Thomas Bach referred to his Japanese hosts as Chinese when he appeared in public on Tuesday for the first time since arriving in Tokyo last week.
Giving a pep talk at the headquarters of the Tokyo Olympics organizing committee, Bach's opening remarks were, "You have managed to make Tokyo the best-ever prepared city for the Olympic Games. This is even more remarkable under the difficult circumstances we all have to face.''
Bach tripped over his words, referring to the "Chinese people'' rather than "Japanese people.''
"Our common target is safe and secure Games for everybody; for the athletes, for all the delegations, and most importantly also for the Chinese people -- Japanese people,'' Bach said, catching his mistake quickly.
Bach's comments in the briefing were interpreted from English to Japanese, but the slip was not included in the interpretations. Still, the Japanese media quickly reported it, and there was backlash on social media.
He ended his speech with a Japanese phrase: "Ganbari mashu,'' which translates as "Let's do our best.''
Bach spent his first three days in isolation at the International Olympic Committee's five-star hotel in central Tokyo, and his movements are limited -- like almost everyone entering for the Olympics -- for the first 14 days.
Organizers and the IOC decided last week to ban fans from all but a handful of outlying venues, a move that came after the Japanese government instituted a state of emergency in Tokyo forced by rising coronavirus cases. The state of emergency went into force Monday and runs through Aug. 22.
The state of emergency will be in effect throughout the entire Olympics, which open July 23 and close on Aug. 8. Its main impact is to push bars and restaurants to close early and stop selling alcohol, a move aimed at cutting down circulation on crowded trains.
Bach's visit on Tuesday coincided with the official opening of the Olympic village on Tokyo Bay. Organizers did not offer an immediate count of how many athletes were on hand.
Bach is scheduled to visit Hiroshima on Friday in an effort to tie the Olympics to the city's effort to promote world peace. IOC vice president John Coates is to visit Nagasaki the same day.
Japan's Kyodo news has reported that a group in Hiroshima is opposing Bach's visit.
A small group of protesters gathered on Saturday outside Bach's hotel carrying placards that said he was unwelcome in Tokyo.
Organizers have been criticized for pressing ahead with the Olympics during the pandemic amid polls that show -- depending on how the question is phrased -- that 50%-80% of the public oppose the Olympics taking place.
The Olympics will involve 11,000 athletes entering Japan along with tens of thousands of others including officials, judges, media and broadcasters.
New virus cases in Tokyo were reported at 830, up from 593 one week ago. It is the 24th straight day that cases were higher than the seven days prior.
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Post by Admin on Jul 14, 2021 5:35:26 GMT
The head of the International Olympic Committee said Tuesday canceling the Tokyo Olympics was not an option, despite the coronavirus pandemic, and going ahead with the games this summer was decided in the interest of athletes preparing for the games for many years. While Tokyo has been under a state of emergency again due to surging infections, Thomas Bach told Kyodo News in an online interview that he will "not speculate" on what could happen if the COVID-19 situation drastically worsens during the Olympics, which will run from July 23 to Aug 8. "We, the IOC, will never abandon the athletes, and with the cancellation, we would have lost a whole generation of athletes. So therefore, a cancellation for us was not really an option," Bach said when referring to the decision in March last year to push back the games due to the global health crisis. Bach said calling off the Olympics and receiving money from its insurance was the "easiest way" at the time, but the IOC did not choose that path and invested more to make the games happen. Without disclosing specifics, the IOC president, who arrived in Tokyo on July 8, said the opening ceremony at the National Stadium will be "very emotional" because it will be the first time since the pandemic that "you will see the whole world in one place." He said it will send a "strong message of unity and of solidarity during these difficult times from Japan to the entire world." The 67-year-old also said he has supported the decision last week to bar spectators from almost all Olympic venues with a "heavy heart" as "the foremost principle is the safety and security for everybody" and his organization's principle was to endorse what the "Japanese authorities deem appropriate." Stressing that "rigid anti-COVID measures," such as regular COVID-19 testing, have been put in place and athletes from overseas will be separated from the Japanese public, he said people in Japan do not have to be afraid of the possibility of the Olympics endangering their health. "They can have confidence in all these measures," he said. However, public support for the Olympics remains low in the country, where many people are worried that the games could trigger a further surge in infections driven by the more contagious Delta variant.
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Post by Admin on Jul 15, 2021 5:01:30 GMT
International Olympic Committee (IOC) President Thomas Bach has admitted he had doubts "every day" that the delayed Olympic Games would take place here following the decision to postpone the event by a year due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Speaking in an online media roundtable, Bach claimed he had been unable to communicate his personal concerns over the fate of Tokyo 2020 in the months since the postponement to 2021 was announced because he did not want to add to the "uncertainty" surrounding the Games. There have been frequent calls for the Games, due to open on July 23, to be cancelled or postponed again from a sceptical Japanese public, but Bach said that had never been an option as the IOC "is not abandoning the athletes". Bach today met with Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga, who urged the IOC to ensure COVID-19 countermeasures are enforced among athletes and staff during the Games. "To gain the understanding of our people, and also for the success of the Tokyo 2020 Games, it is absolutely necessary that all participants take appropriate actions and measures including countermeasures against the pandemic," Suga told Bach. "As the host of the Games, I do hope that the IOC will make the efforts so that all athletes and stakeholders will fully comply with these measures." The meeting came as Tokyo reported 1,149 cases of COVID-19, the highest figure in the capital since mid-January. In response, Bach promised the IOC and the Olympic Movement would "do everything not to bring any risks to the Japanese people". A fourth state of emergency in Tokyo was declared last week because of the spike in infections in the capital, which led to spectators being banned from almost every Olympic venue at Tokyo 2020. The German also insisted the easiest option for the IOC would have been to cancel the Games, which he promised would be "historic", despite a cluster of COVID-19 cases around the event. An official in the Refugee Olympic Team delegation and seven staff at a hotel housing 31 Brazilian athletes have tested positive for COVID-19. "If we would have thought about the Games from a commercial point of view, or from the workload we have, the easiest would have been to cancel, draw on the insurance we had at the time for the cancellation and start preparing for Paris," Bach said. "This was never really an option because the IOC is not abandoning the athletes, therefore we decided not to draw on the insurance but to invest more money so that the postponed Games can take place. "We can confidently say we have minimised the risk as much as we could.
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Post by Admin on Jul 17, 2021 7:28:06 GMT
The Olympic president pitched up in Hiroshima on Friday attempting to add a veneer of global peacemaking to a Games that is already mired in controversy and rejected by the citizens of the host country.
As Thomas Bach lowered his head to pay tribute to those who died in the nuclear bombing of August 6, 1945, the voices of angry protesters punctured the silence.
The locals were not having it.
A cluster of protesters held up signs denouncing the visit on a street adjacent to the Atomic Bomb Dome as the president of the International Olympic Committee laid a wreath of flowers at the Atomic Bomb Victims Memorial. Protests were scheduled to continue all day throughout the city.
Bach can’t say he was surprised. Japan, and Hiroshima in particular, had a message for President Bach and Vice President John Coates long before the “peace mission” began: Go ‘Bach’ home and don’t bother us anymore. Take your COVID-19 variants and your tax money-guzzling entourage and don’t come again. It would be hard to think of anyone more hated in Japan right now, than “Baron Ripoff” as he has been dubbed by the popular press, except for perhaps Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga. There have been angry protests in front of the hotel where Bach has been staying and the Tokyo Metropolitan Government has mobilized the police riot squad to protect the esteemed IOC elite from the unhappy citizens of the megalopolis. When Bach met with Tokyo Governor Yuriko Koike at the Metropolitan Headquarters in Shinjuku, on July 15, Japan’s military, the Self-Defense Forces, appeared to be guarding the perimeter. It’s not a festive mood.
The Tokyo 2020 Olympics are due to start in seven days, with roughly 70 percent of the public opposing them, and the capital now in its fourth state of emergency due to rising COVID-19 infections. The positivity rates for testing are well above what the World Health Organization considers a safe number to reopen a city.
Bach, who arrived in Japan on July 8, botched his opening salvo to its citizens by claiming he was aiming for a safe and secure Games for the “Chinese people,” during a meeting with the chair of the Tokyo Olympic and Paralympic Organizing Committee. Of course, the Beijing Winter Olympics, which the IOC has approved for 2022 is also a source of great controversy due to China’s crushing of democracy in Hong Kong and its brutal treatment of the Uyghurs. But Bach doesn’t seem to care about their safety and human rights—the Olympics must go on.
Be that as it may, the safety of most Chinese people won’t come under threat from these Olympic Games; sadly that is not the case for the Japanese people. On Thursday, a petition calling for the cancelation of the Olympics was submitted to the government of Tokyo with 450,000 signatures. Although there is a feeling of resignation that the Olympics will happen, a recent poll found that over 80 percent of the public fears it will cause a surge in infections.
Be that as it may, you may wonder, why is Bach visiting Hiroshima in the first place and why aren’t the locals happy about it?
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Post by Admin on Aug 6, 2021 19:03:08 GMT
Thomas Bach, the International Olympic Committee president, has hailed athletes for giving “soul” to the Games and admitted he feared for the event after almost all spectators were barred.
However, his claims that the Tokyo Games had “far exceeded my personal expectations”, and had been a great success were widely criticised on Japanese social media with users calling him “an Olympic aristocrat who is trapped in a delusional shell”.
Heat, the track or super spikes: what is causing fast times at the Olympics? Speaking two days before the Olympics end on Sunday, Bach struck an upbeat note. “After we had to accept the decision by the Japanese authorities to have no spectators, I must admit we were concerned that these Olympic Games could become an Olympic Games without soul,” he said.
“But fortunately what we have seen here is totally different. Because the athletes gave these Olympic Games a great Olympic soul. From what I experienced at the Olympic village and the competition sites, I must say that the atmosphere has been more intense than ever before.
“Tokyo is the best-ever prepared Olympic city. This has proven to be true,” he said, citing reasons such as the “efficiency” of anti-Covid-19 measures implemented before and during the 17-day Games, which are mostly being held behind closed doors.
On Thursday, Tokyo’s confirmed daily Covid-19 cases hit another record high of 5,042. Bach insisted, however, that the spike in the number of cases was not linked to the Olympics, pointing out the 11,000 athletes had been in a bubble away from the population while everyone else involved in the Games had been regularly tested with very low rates of positives.
“Our mission was and is to keep the athletes safe and have no transfer from athletes to the population,” Bach said. “All the figures confirm this concept has worked. This is supported by the WHO and experts around the world. We have full confidence in the Japanese authorities and that they are addressing these in the right way.”
Bach said he had been impressed and surprised with the standard of competition given the challenges of the pandemic. “What we can see now is that these Games are coming at a moment where the world was longing for a symbol of hope.”
However Bach’s speech was soon the most trending item on Twitter in Japan, with the reaction generally hostile. “I’m angry,” wrote one user. “There wasn’t a word of hope for people who work at the risk of their lives in the medical field in order to support the Olympics.”
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