After Japan announced that foreign spectators would not be allowed to come to the next Olympic Games, there is a general perception in Japan that organizing these games is going to be a curse for the country. A comment by Finance Minister Taro Aso made last year in the ongoing discussions in the Japanese media is now being cited repeatedly. Aso had said that the 2020 Olympics has been ‘blighted’. At that time, the first round of the Corona epidemic had occurred, which led to the decision to postpone the Olympic Games.
With major sporting events such as the Olympics, there is hope for infrastructure development and economic profits in the host country. But it is now estimated that Japan may lose $ 23 billion. Japan has built on a large scale for the Tokyo Olympics. They have incurred heavy expenditure. But due to the absence of foreign visitors, the expectation of foreign exchange inflow is now broken. It is feared that if the condition of the corona infection remains the same, then the native audience will also come to the stadium very rarely. It is also feared that many foreign players should disassociate themselves from this tournament. This will have an impact on revenue from TV.
Katsuhiro Miyamoto, a specialist associated with Kansai University, has told a website that if the damage was limited to $ 23 billion, it would be considered a relief. The worst-case could be that the Olympics, scheduled in July, have to be postponed again. Corona infection is still not relieved in Japan.
Now it is discussed here that Japan has already faced the ‘cursed’ Olympics once before. The Olympic Games were to be held in Tokyo in 1940. But the Second World War broke out in 1939, due to which those games had to be postponed. There were two more occasions when the Olympic Games lost their sheen due to political disputes. The US faction boycotted the Moscow Olympics in 1980, in protest against the then Soviet Union sending troops to Afghanistan. In response to this, the 1984 Olympic Games held in the city of Los Angeles, USA were boycotted by the Soviet camp countries. This caused loss to the organizers of the Olympic Games on both of those occasions.
Japan’s Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga has expressed hope that the situation will improve by July and that domestic viewers will reach to watch the game. But in recent opinion polls in the country, the vast majority have expressed disagreement over the holding of these games. In a recent survey, 80 percent of people disagreed with the plan to organize the games in front of a home-grown audience. This plan of Japan is not popular in foreign countries also. In a survey conducted by the Japan Press Institute in China, South Korea, Thailand, and France, more than 70 percent of the people said that the Olympic Games should be postponed for at least one more year.
Experts say that Western countries are still facing the Corona epidemic. In this environment, people there are less likely to be interested in sports. For this reason, companies that buy TV broadcasting rights in those countries can suffer huge losses. Observations published in the Japanese media said that the intention of showing the soft power of Japan Ni by organizing the Olympic Games in a grand manner can not be fulfilled now. No one is in the mood to see such power in the world right now. In such a situation even if there are games, even then these events will not be able to recover from the shadow of the curse that has taken place.
