R. Scott Russell, assistant professor of Sports Management, recently revealed how the Olympic games have been impacted by a pair of global health emergencies.
"The Games Must Go On: Can the Olympic Games Survive after Back-to-Back Viruses?" was part of the Mount's Investigating Research on Campus (iROC) series, which is free and open to the public.
With a humble beginning of 13 countries and fewer than 300 athletes, the Olympics has evolved to include more than 200 countries and 11,000 athletes. However, for two consecutive Olympiads, bringing the world's finest athletes together in one place has also meant the possibility of spreading a devastating virus.
In 2016, the Zika Virus caused many of the world's elite athletes to consider the personal health risks of traveling to Rio de Janeiro. The virus, carried mainly by mosquitos, could cause birth defects in children born to infected women. Without a vaccine for Zika, precautions were limited and included reducing the mosquito population as much as possible with pesticides.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the World Health Organization, and the Pan American Health Organization all recommended that pregnant women not travel to Brazil, "which, for athletes who had been training their whole lives to compete in the Olympic games, that really presented a personal challenge that a lot of people had to struggle with and make a discussion about," Russell said.
With strict countermeasures in place, "Ultimately, the games [did] go on," Russell explained. "Those measures were successful: the number of confirmed infections to athletes from all over the world who attended the games was zero."
The 2020 Olympic Games in Tokyo weren't as lucky. Due to the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic, things weren't dissimilar to the Zika concerns of 2016, Russell said. It came down to two questions: "Do we cancel the games? Do we move the games?"
It was the latter. Like many events in 2020, the Olympics would be postponed.
"Japan was devastated," Russell said. "Host sites are selected seven to eight years in advance. So in addition to bidding for the games and trying to earn the right to host the games...the Japanese had been preparing for the 2020 games for almost 10 years."
The postponement is estimated to have cost Japan about $5 billion, noted Russell. But that's a far better option than canceling the games outright, which would have cost the country $41.5 billion, he added.
The Olympic Games have survived two World Wars, boycotts, the Cold War, and a terrorist attack. Can they survive this latest threat?
Indeed: The games are scheduled to be held from July 23 to August 8, albeit with plenty of restrictions in place. Among other precautions, there will be no alcohol served at the games, spectators will need to wear masks, and cheering will be banned, in favor of clapping.
For more than 3,000 years, the Olympic Games have been bringing people together from far-away lands to compete in peaceful athletic competition. For the ancient Greeks, this meant warring city-states laying down their arms and traveling to Olympia to participate in a great festival in honor of the King of the Gods: Zeus.
Pierre de Coubertin, the mastermind behind the modern Olympic Games, imagined a similar purpose when the Olympics were re-born in Athens in 1896. Coubertin's Olympic ideal, and one of his driving inspirations for the International Olympic Committee, was to provide the world with a way to come together in peace on a regular basis not only to compete, but also to share ideas, stories, and cultures.
In 2019, Russell traveled to Athens and Olympia with 20 Mount Saint Mary College students for a study abroad trip focused on investigating the history of the Ancient and Modern Olympic Games. This experience led to the creation of a course on the Olympics that was first offered at the Mount in the Fall 2020 semester.
The class has proven to be immensely popular and will allow the Mount to share the evolving history of the Olympic Games with students for many Olympiads to come.