Experiences of a time that seems fictional

Not even the boldest writers of Black Mirror would have been able to imagine the images that, even after two years, were marked on us from the unspeakable days of living in pandemic mode.

Like many Argentine fans, from time to time, we wonder if, indeed, it is true that we were champions in Qatar, the months of confinement, isolation, infections, deaths, swabs, masks and desolation reappear to us like a nightmare in slow motion that we are not entirely sure if we have experienced them.

Painful days. Crazy days. How crazy it was to have experienced an Olympic Game at a time when the end of the plague was a vague reference that no one dared to predict?

All of us have fresh in our memories the impossibility, not only of traveling from one country to another, but of crossing borders between provinces. How can we describe, then, that athletes, leaders, coaches, volunteers and journalists from more than 200 countries have been able to meet for almost a month in a single city?

This data alone is enough to consider Tokyo 2020 (or 2021 or 2020 + 1) as one of the most extraordinary episodes in the history of sports. And of humanity.

In the midst of almost two years of not being able to do almost anything that would bring us closer as human beings, the most complete comprehensive sample of the spirit of sport made it clear more than ever the dimension of its energy, as undisguised as it is inexplicable.

If the mere mention of the episode itself already means something extraordinary, the enumeration of the experiences on Japanese soil exceeds any pretense of fantasy.

Every time I review what I experienced in Tokyo, the first thing that comes to mind were the first three days of stay in which we were only allowed to leave the hotel room for 15 minutes a day. In some sense, nothing too different from what you and I live in our own house. For the rest, the list of circumstances that we will hardly go through again seems incomprehensible.

The Japanese government required three PCR tests on consecutive days before the trip. Only those made in the sanatorium that won the tender made for the occasion were valid.

After an eternal journey of more than 36 hours and being able to remove our masks only during meal times and a first saliva test when we arrived at Narita Airport, the members of TyCSports had to do similar checks every other day until the end of the games.

As required by the Japanese government, all foreigners should enable two applications on our cell phones. OCHA, essential to enter the country. COCOA, the one that we should enable when we arrive at our destination: in the case that someone disabled Bluetooth it would automatically activate an alarm and local authorities could look for you and even remove your credential.

Soon, I had our own dimension of the control to which we were subject.

In one of those 15-minute outings, we took the opportunity together with the channel’s colleagues to record the first promo on Japanese soil. Half an hour after I uploaded an image of me wearing a t-shirt alluding to the 64 games to my social media, I received a call from an important authority in the Olympic world. “By any chance, were you recording something on the street, without a mask and with your badge hanging on your side?”, he asked. Faced with an affirmative answer, he added: “I know it seems like an exaggeration, but avoid doing something like that again. Less so without the mask.”

Beyond the local health protocol, the underlying problem was that, while the Japanese government insisted on allowing the holding of the games, the opposition put all its energy into demonstrating the risk of “inviting” so many foreigners who would also violate the rules. Two weeks later, and already oblivious to such a level of persecution, we would see not only the success of the move but also the enormous prize that was taken home by the German Thomas Bach, head of the IOC, whose audacity and stubbornness were decisive in carrying out something that, even for his colleagues, could have meant potentiating a disaster.

After the 72-hour lockdown, we discovered that an exclusive transportation system had been set up for the foreign press. A lot of taxis were designed to work with us based on a rabid logic. “If someone were to infect them, it would be a matter between the local driver and the foreign journalist and would avoid contagion to the citizens of the Japanese capital.”

And so on. With as much rigor as kindness and efficiency: I never enter a press center having to go through so many controls. It never took such a short time to get to my work place.

At every obstacle the Japanese made every effort to simplify the conflict. Including the manager of the hotel where we lived who would come to our door in person with the food package that we bought through an application that, occasionally, offered 80 percent of the menus of the gastronomic options written in English.

Against any obstacle, I wouldn’t hesitate for a second to relive that story. Suddenly, a lot of compatriots enjoyed every second of the 24-hour Olympic broadcast that we gave ourselves. Logical: After so many months of reading the numbers of misfortune, how can we not enjoy a wrestling match between a Belgian and an Afghan!

These were days of too many emotions on the surface, of seeing that each of us, from the most exposed to the most anonymous, were participating in something unique.

Tokyo 2020 gave us the strange feeling that there was life at the end of the dark tunnel of the pandemic.

At the end of the tour, I found that I wasn’t the only one whose emptiness at the end turned into sobs. And I returned home with the feeling that only the Olympic Games as an event and the Japanese as hosts could be capable of something similar.