1-C 東京オリンピック&IOCに批判的な意見
東京2020オリンピック・パラリンピックが、コロナ蔓延の中で開催されることについて、多くの反対意見が出されました。「出場予定の選手の気持ちはわかるが、スポーツは他の機会にもできるだろう」と言うような意見を聞くと、選手たちが気の毒で、私は第三者ながらも、憤りを感じました。オリンピック・パラリンピックを東京に誘致した時、その意義に多くの日本人が賛同したはずです。しかし、オリパラの開催前、そういった意義がすっかり忘れ去られてしまったような世論にも、私はひどくショックを受けました。また、「誘致したのが日本」という事実を忘れてしまったかのように、「外国人が来てコロナを蔓延させるのか！」的なデモを行って、密になっている人々にも唖然としました。
大会前の世論に抗えない中、ボランティアとして活動を始めました。そんな中、ボランティアには多くの外国人が参加していることを知り、「本当に国際的な大会なんだ」と実感したり、大会開催を心から歓迎して活動をしている人が多いことを実感し、元気をもらいました。
大会が終わってみると、オリパラで日本人選手団は多くのメダルを獲得し、「あの世論は何だったんだ？」と思うほど、「開催されてよかった」と思う人が多いことが、世論調査で明らかになりました。本当に良かったと思っています。
オリパラ開催については、多額の経費への批判も問題になり、バッハＩＯＣ会長に対しても、かなり辛辣な意見もありました。ここに紹介しておきます。
ただ、オリパラ開催直前や期間中の大変な時期に、ボランティアへの感謝の気持ちをはっきり言葉にしてくれたのは、バッハ会長だけでした。自分としては、やはり心を打たれました。なぜなら、日本人のトップと思しき人々からは、聞かれなかった言葉だったからです。お金のことはよくわかりませんが、一応付け加えておきます。
（2021年9月16日/ Makki)
Japan should cut its losses and tell the IOC to take its Olympic pillage
somewhere else(May 5, 2021/ The Washington Post/ By Sally Jenkins, Columnist)
Somewhere along the line Baron Von Ripper-off and the other gold-plated pretenders at the International Olympic Committee decided to treat Japan as their footstool. But Japan didn’t surrender its sovereignty when it agreed to host the Olympics. If the Tokyo Summer Games have become a threat to the national interest, Japan’s leaders should tell the IOC to go find another duchy to plunder. A cancellation would be hard — but it would also be a cure.
Von Ripper-off, a.k.a. IOC President Thomas Bach, and his attendants have a bad habit of ruining their hosts, like royals on tour who consume all the wheat sheaves in the province and leave stubble behind. Where, exactly, does the IOC get off imperiously insisting that the Games must go on, when fully 72 percent of the Japanese public is reluctant or unwilling to entertain 15,000 foreign athletes and officials in the midst of a pandemic?
The answer is that the IOC derives its power strictly from the Olympic “host contract.” It’s a highly illuminating document that reveals much about the highhanded organization and how it leaves host nations with crippling debts. Seven pages are devoted to “medical services” the host must provide — free of charge — to anyone with an Olympic credential, including rooms at local hospitals expressly reserved for them and only them. Tokyo organizers have estimated they will need to divert about 10,000 medical workers to service the IOC’s demands.
Eight Olympic workers tested positive for the coronavirus during the torch relay last week — though they were wearing masks. Less than 2 percent of Japan’s population is vaccinated. Small wonder the head of Japan’s medical workers’ union, Susumu Morita, is incensed at the prospect of draining mass medical resources. “I am furious at the insistence on staging the Olympics despite the risk to patients’ and nurses’ health and lives,” he said in a statement.
Japan’s leaders should cut their losses and cut them now, with 11 weeks left to get out of the remainders of this deal. The Olympics always cost irrational sums — and they lead to irrational decisions. And it’s an irrational decision to host an international mega-event amid a global pandemic. It’s equally irrational to keep tossing good money after bad.
At this point, money is the chief reason anyone is even considering going forward with a Summer Games. Japan has invested nearly $25 billion in hosting. But how much more will it cost to try to bubble 15,000 visitors, with daily testing and other protocols, and to provide the security and massive logistics and operating costs? And what might a larger disaster cost?
Suppose Japan were to break the contract. What would the IOC do? Sue? If so, in what court of justice? Who would have jurisdiction? What would such a suit do to the IOC’s reputation — forcing the Games in a stressed and distressed nation during a pandemic?
Japan’s leaders have more leverage than they may realize — at the very least, they are in position to extract maximal concessions from the IOC for hosting some limited or delayed version of the Games, one more protective of the host.
The predicament in Tokyo is symptomatic of a deeper, longer-lasting illness in the Olympics. The Games have become a to-the-very-brink exercise in pain and exhaustion for everyone involved, and fewer countries are willing to accept these terms. Greed and blowout costs have rendered it an event that courts extreme disaster. In September, a report out of Oxford University’s business school found that the IOC has consistently “misled” countries about the risks and costs of hosting. Example: The IOC pretends that a contingency of about 9.1 percent is adequate to cover unforeseen expenses.
The true average cost overrun on a Summer Games? It’s 213 percent.
The IOC understates these risks for a reason: because fewer and fewer countries want to do business with it after seeing all the pillage.
The IOC intentionally encourages excess. It mandates elaborate facilities and events for the sake of revenue, most of which it keeps for itself while dumping the costs entirely on the host, which must guarantee all the financing. The IOC sets the size and design standards, demands the hosts spend bigger and bigger — against all better judgment — while holding close the licensing profits and broadcasts fees. Tokyo’s original budget was $7 billion. It’s now four times that.
In the Oxford paper, “Regression to the Tail: Why the Olympics Blow Up,” authors Bent Flyvbjerg, Alexander Budzier and Daniel Lunn observe that the Games dwarf every other national building project on earth in terms of cost blowouts — even mega-dams and tunnel digs. The ever-increasing complexity and expense, and the long window of planning (seven to 11 years) make them a project with high uncertainty that can be affected by everything from inflation to terrorist threat and “the risk of a big, fat black swan flying through it.” The Rio Games, held in 2016 in the midst of brutal economic downturn, were 352 percent over their original budget. And these blowouts are “systematic,” not happenstance.
“Either the IOC is deluded about the real cost-risks when it insists that a 9.1 percent contingency is sufficient, or the Committee deliberately overlooks the uncomfortable facts. In either case, host cities and nations are misled,” they write.
This is why virtually the only government leaders that will have anything to do with the IOC anymore are thugocrats such as Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, who can coerce labor and spend limitlessly for prestige. Over the past 20 years, other potential hosts have dried up. Among those who have wisely said no to the IOC: Barcelona, Boston, Budapest, Davos, Hamburg, Krakow, Munich, Oslo, Rome, Stockholm and Toronto. Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, who wrested away key concessions from the IOC for the 2028 Games, has observed that most cities “will never say yes to the Olympics again unless they find the right model.” This is where the barons’ gluttony has led them.
All of this should empower Japan’s leaders to do whatever is best for themselves and their own people. When the Games reasonably could be portrayed as a source of international tourism revenue, perhaps some of the expense could be justified. But now the costs to the Japanese people run much deeper than financial. If ever there was a time and place to remember that the IOC is a fake principality, an oft-corrupt cash receptacle for peddlers with pretensions of grandeur, this is it. The IOC has no real powers, other than those temporarily granted by participant countries, and Japan owes it nothing. A cancellation would be painful — but cleansing.
上記記事の語彙解説など
Japan should cut its losses and tell the IOC to take its Olympic pillage somewhere else
*pillage=ﾋﾟれｯｼﾞ=略奪、略奪する≒plunder/steal/rob
Somewhere along the line Baron Von Ripper-off and the other gold-plated pretenders at the International Olympic Committee/ decided to treat Japan as their footstool.
*gold plate=金製の食器類、金メッキ
*pletender=見せかける人、偽善者、詐称者、（不等な）要求者
*Barron Von Ripper-off…ぼったくり男爵…バッハ氏への痛烈な批判
Barron=ドイツの男爵 / Von=ふｫﾝﾇ=貴族の家の前に付ける/ rip off=だまし取る
*footstool=足を載せる台
But Japan didn’t surrender its sovereignty/ when it agreed to host the Olympics. If the Tokyo Summer Games have become a threat to the national interest, /Japan’s leaders should tell the IOC to go find another duchy to plunder. A cancellation would be hard — but it would also be a cure.
*duchy=公国、公爵領
*cure=治療法
下線部…国益の脅威になる
*plunder=ﾌﾟらﾝﾀﾞｰ=略奪、略奪する
Von Ripper-off, a.k.a. IOC President Thomas Bach, and his attendants/ have a bad habit of ruining their hosts,/ like royals on tour/ who consume all the wheat sheaves in the province and leave stubble behind.
Where, exactly, does the IOC get off imperiously insisting that the Games must go on, when fully 72 percent of the Japanese public is reluctant or unwilling to entertain 15,000 foreign athletes and officials in the midst of a pandemic?
The answer is that the IOC derives its power strictly from the Olympic “host contract.” It’s a highly illuminating document that reveals much about the highhanded organization and how it leaves host nations with crippling debts. Seven pages are devoted to “medical services” the host must provide — free of charge — to anyone with an Olympic credential, including rooms at local hospitals expressly reserved for them and only them. Tokyo organizers have estimated they will need to divert about 10,000 medical workers to service the IOC’s demands.
Eight Olympic workers tested positive for the coronavirus during the torch relay last week — though they were wearing masks. Less than 2 percent of Japan’s population is vaccinated. Small wonder the head of Japan’s medical workers’ union, Susumu Morita, is incensed at the prospect of draining mass medical resources. “I am furious at the insistence on staging the Olympics despite the risk to patients’ and nurses’ health and lives,” he said in a statement.
Japan’s leaders should cut their losses and cut them now, with 11 weeks left to get out of the remainders of this deal. The Olympics always cost irrational sums — and they lead to irrational decisions. And it’s an irrational decision to host an international mega-event amid a global pandemic. It’s equally irrational to keep tossing good money after bad.
At this point, money is the chief reason anyone is even considering going forward with a Summer Games. Japan has invested nearly $25 billion in hosting. But how much more will it cost to try to bubble 15,000 visitors, with daily testing and other protocols, and to provide the security and massive logistics and operating costs? And what might a larger disaster cost?
Suppose Japan were to break the contract. What would the IOC do? Sue? If so, in what court of justice? Who would have jurisdiction? What would such a suit do to the IOC’s reputation — forcing the Games in a stressed and distressed nation during a pandemic?
Japan’s leaders have more leverage than they may realize — at the very least, they are in position to extract maximal concessions from the IOC for hosting some limited or delayed version of the Games, one more protective of the host.
The predicament in Tokyo is symptomatic of a deeper, longer-lasting illness in the Olympics. The Games have become a to-the-very-brink exercise in pain and exhaustion for everyone involved, and fewer countries are willing to accept these terms. Greed and blowout costs have rendered it an event that courts extreme disaster. In September, a report out of Oxford University’s business school found that the IOC has consistently “misled” countries about the risks and costs of hosting. Example: The IOC pretends that a contingency of about 9.1 percent is adequate to cover unforeseen expenses.
The true average cost overrun on a Summer Games? It’s 213 percent.
The IOC understates these risks for a reason: because fewer and fewer countries want to do business with it after seeing all the pillage.
The IOC intentionally encourages excess. It mandates elaborate facilities and events for the sake of revenue, most of which it keeps for itself while dumping the costs entirely on the host, which must guarantee all the financing. The IOC sets the size and design standards, demands the hosts spend bigger and bigger — against all better judgment — while holding close the licensing profits and broadcasts fees. Tokyo’s original budget was $7 billion. It’s now four times that.
In the Oxford paper, “Regression to the Tail: Why the Olympics Blow Up,” authors Bent Flyvbjerg, Alexander Budzier and Daniel Lunn observe that the Games dwarf every other national building project on earth in terms of cost blowouts — even mega-dams and tunnel digs. The ever-increasing complexity and expense, and the long window of planning (seven to 11 years) make them a project with high uncertainty that can be affected by everything from inflation to terrorist threat and “the risk of a big, fat black swan flying through it.” The Rio Games, held in 2016 in the midst of brutal economic downturn, were 352 percent over their original budget. And these blowouts are “systematic,” not happenstance.
“Either the IOC is deluded about the real cost-risks when it insists that a 9.1 percent contingency is sufficient, or the Committee deliberately overlooks the uncomfortable facts. In either case, host cities and nations are misled,” they write.
This is why virtually the only government leaders that will have anything to do with the IOC anymore are thugocrats such as Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, who can coerce labor and spend limitlessly for prestige. Over the past 20 years, other potential hosts have dried up. Among those who have wisely said no to the IOC: Barcelona, Boston, Budapest, Davos, Hamburg, Krakow, Munich, Oslo, Rome, Stockholm and Toronto. Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, who wrested away key concessions from the IOC for the 2028 Games, has observed that most cities “will never say yes to the Olympics again unless they find the right model.” This is where the barons’ gluttony has led them.
All of this should empower Japan’s leaders to do whatever is best for themselves and their own people. When the Games reasonably could be portrayed as a source of international tourism revenue, perhaps some of the expense could be justified. But now the costs to the Japanese people run much deeper than financial. If ever there was a time and place to remember that the IOC is a fake principality, an oft-corrupt cash receptacle for peddlers with pretensions of grandeur, this is it. The IOC has no real powers, other than those temporarily granted by participant countries, and Japan owes it nothing. A cancellation would be painful — but cleansing.
上記記事に関するJ Cast会社ウォッチの記事よりバッハ会長は開催国を食い物にする悪癖がある
コロナ禍に揺れる日本国内の状況に、海外の有力メディアが相次いで、「東京五輪は中止すべきだ」と報道した。米紙サンフランシスコ・クロニクル（電子版）が5月3日、「Tokyo Olympics should not be held in 2021 under COVID's long shadow」（新型コロナの長期的な大流行のもと、東京五輪は開催されるべきではない）という見出しで中止を訴えた。
同紙スポーツコラムニストのアン・キリオンさんは、
「パンデミックは終息しておらず、終わりに近づいてすらいない。ワクチン接種が順調に進む米国では改善しつつあるが、インドや欧州の一部、南米の多くの国では深刻な状況が続いている。安全な形で開催するのに、開会式までの3カ月弱では時間が足りなすぎる」
と訴えた。
IOC（国際オリンピック委員会）のバッハ会長を「ぼったくり男爵」（Von Ripper-off）とまで酷評し、「日本はIOCにだまされる」と東京五輪の中止を訴えたのが米有力紙ワシントン・ポスト（5月5日付電子版）だ。「Japan should cut its losses and tell the IOC to take its Olympic pillage somewhere else」（日本はこれ以上の負担を切り、IOCにオリンピックを略奪するなと言うべきだ）という見出しで、五輪の中止を訴えた。
同紙のコラムニスト、サリー・ジェンキンスさんは、
「バッハ会長は『ぼったくり男爵』として知られている男だ。地方行脚で小麦を食べ尽くす貴族のように開催国を食い物にする悪い癖がある。多額の大会経費を開催国に押しつけている。彼が五輪を強行開催する主な理由はカネだ」
として、日本の世論調査で7割以上が中止・再延期を求めている現状や、大会に向けて多くの医療従事者を必要とすることが非難をされていることを取り上げ、
「世界的大流行の中で国際的なメガイベントを主催することは不合理な決定だ。日本にとって五輪のキャンセルは苦痛だが、スッキリする」
とアドバイスしたのだった。
