Foreign fans will be barred from Tokyo Olympics this summer
The Tokyo Olympics will look a lot different this year. The Tokyo 2020 Olympic Organizing Committee has ruled that foreign fans will not be allowed at the games in Japan. In fact, they won’t even be allowed in the country over concerns that foreign guests could lead to a spike in COVID-19 in Japan.
COVID-19 was slowly gaining ground when concerns about the pandemic led the International Olympic Committee to push the games to the summer of 2021. (They’re still known as the Tokyo 2020 games, by the way) The fear, at that time, was that there was no way to ensure the safety of athletes and Japanese citizens with an influx of people coming into the country.
Japanese officials worry that allowing foreign fans to travel to the country could lead to a new outbreak. “In order to give clarity to ticket holders living overseas and to enable them to adjust their travel plans at this stage, the parties on the Japanese side have come to the conclusion that they will not be able to enter into Japan at the time of the Olympic and Paralympic Games,” the committee said in a statement.
No foreign fans will be allowed entry into Japan during the Olympics
The news shouldn’t be surprising at this point, as events continue to reschedule dates as a result of the pandemic. Though vaccines are becoming more widely available, they’re not available to everyone worldwide and the risk of bringing new strains of the virus into an island country are simply too great.
As people struggle to get back to normal after a year of dealing with the pandemic, there is a growing push for things to reopen as they were before the pandemic. Movie theaters and theme parks are slowly starting to open again in states across the US, but with drastically limited capacities.
Even if Japan and the IOC wanted to allow a limited number of fans into the stands for the Olympics, it would be nearly impossible to determine how many fans could attend events at each site given the global demand for tickets. And even with limited capacities, the number of fans at each venue would still be a lot of people traveling throughout Tokyo, which increases the risk of an outbreak.
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Though the news is disappointing, it’s in the best interest of Japan and the Olympic athletes so that they can compete at the highest level without worrying that they are risking accidental exposure to the virus from spectators.