Crash Tackle: Tokyo Olympics the Games everyone in lockdown needed
For millions of Australians in lockdown, the Tokyo Olympics was a big warm hug. So, what happens now that the greatest reality show on the planet is over?
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They started as the silent Games and morphed into the greatest reality television show on the planet.
For millions of Australians in lockdown - and sports fans across the globe - it was as if the flames of the Olympic cauldron had crackled through cyberspace and ignited a warm, flickering fireplace in their loungerooms.
Fighting off the gnawing pangs of isolation somehow felt easier when your living room became part of the biggest virtual sporting coliseum the world has seen.
You know an event is special when you feel withdrawal symptoms even before it’s gone. For millions of Australians, the conversation went from “How can they hold these Games?’’ to “What will we do without them?’’
Australia’s record gold-medal tally stirred national sentiment, but sometimes it was non-medal magic that meant just as much.
A week ago most of the nation didn’t even know who was Peter Bol. Yet on Wednesday night, a State of Origin-sized 2.5 million Australians stayed up past 10pm to watch him run fourth in the 800m.
The following morning at coffee shops around the country, people asked, “Did you watch Bol?” — no first name necessary — as if it was the Super Bol.
In a sports world becoming increasingly influenced by cold, selfish and dollar-dictated behaviour, Australian audiences got off on the quirky camaraderie of the skateboarders, and watching Cedric Dubler abandon his own race plan to urge young teammate Ash Moloney to a bronze medal in the decathlon.
These moments are normally found on grainy black-and-white news reels.
In so many ways, the Tokyo Games were like a journey back in time to days of champagne and chivalry as they delivered a crazy cocktail of isolation and warmth.
The vibe flowed all the way to Australia’s swim parents’ pod at Noosa, where the mums and dads respectfully clapped United States swim star Katie Ledecky whenever she was introduced on television.
It seemed behind every gold-medal win there was a telling tale of grit or hard graft - from K-2 1000m gold medallist Tom Green being raised and funded by his single mum and promising to hang his medal around her neck to decathlete Moloney needing to auction a jersey from State of Origin champion Trevor Gillmeister to sustain his journey to Tokyo.
Australian audiences were fascinated by stories such as how Ariarne Titmus’s parents Steve and Robyn could uproot from Tasmania and move to Queensland without any guaranteed work to help their daughter’s swimming career.
Eventually the real story crystallised, and all and once it was simple, inspiring and mildly chastening – Australia had been driven to its best ever Olympics on a mixture of pride and peanuts, with most athletes gaining minimal financial support and being heavily assisted by their parents.
Australia provided some of the most emotive stories of the Games, none more powerful than Kaylee McKeown winning two pool golds and blowing a kiss to her late father Sholto for giving her the desperate surge she didn’t know she had.
Most of Australia’s swim victories were rousing come-from-behind efforts, embodying the never-say-die spirit of the entire show.
It is true there were two Tokyos – one fighting off a Covid-19 curse of more than 5000 cases a day last week; the other one locked inside the heavily insulated Olympic bubble that wobbled and quivered but somehow never burst.
Tokyo got the job done because it simply had to. A condition of the $4 billion television deal with American giant NBC is that the money gets paid early, so the television dosh had long been spent and drained through the Olympic system by the time the Games arrived.
Few forces are as powerful as the need to turn up for work once you have been paid for it, and the Games would have gone ahead if veteran Olympic boss Thomas Bach had to whip his old board shorts out of the cupboard and swim the 50m freestyle.
But it never came to that. All sports were touched in some way by Covid-19 – from compromised national championships to lack of overseas travel to sponsorship cuts to the occasional late withdrawal – but not one event was ruined by it.
The standard of competition was pleasantly and unexpectedly high, with world records regularly smashed in the pool and on the athletics and cycling tracks.
These Games were blessed with a “have a go’’ spirit and were devoid of petty whingeing. All the tradition gripes about beds being too narrow, the showers too cold or the buses too slow vaporised amid the knowledge this was a time to celebrate rather than complain.
On behalf of the millions of couch surfers who were entranced by you via television, thank you Tokyo. Missing you already.
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