The most unusual Summer Olympic Games in history are now just two and a half months away. As Tokyo prepares to host the first-ever postponed Olympics, an unsettling realization has fallen upon the Games' stakeholders: they are in for a restrained, rule-laden and austere experience very much in keeping with the world's earliest and strictest pandemic precautions prior to the emergence of the vaccines.
© Eugene Hoshiko, APA man wearing a protective mask to help curb the spread of the coronavirus stands guard near a logo of Tokyo 2020 Olympics that are now scheduled for summer of 2021.
This will be nothing like any previous Summer Games, according to 11 officials, coaches and other experts interviewed by USA TODAY Sports. To win a gold medal, or even to just get to the starting line, athletes will have to navigate a maze of detailed rules and regulations that threaten to drain the life out of much of their Olympic experience.
As the rules stand now, the athletes will live a spartan existence. They will go from their Olympic village room to a practice or a competition, then return back to their room. The same goes for coaches, officials and journalists, by and large. They will all move around in buses, a traveling bubble if you will, with COVID-19 tests and temperature checks a major part of daily life.
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Perhaps the young athletes will be able to leave their rooms to mix with their countrymen and women in the hallways of their Olympic village building, or in a common area, before going back to their rooms to sleep and get ready for another day of competition.
When they are finished with their events, they must leave for home quickly. According to the Tokyo organizers' current "Playbook" - a 60-page guide to protocols that is going to be finalized in June - athletes will be whisked to the airport no more than 48 hours after the completion of their competition. One wonders who will be left for the Closing Ceremony.
It's very likely many nations will not even allow their athletes to spend time with their peers from other countries in the village's massive Main Dining Hall or other common areas, places where many an Olympian has lingered in years past. "Grab and Go" carryout or food provided by an athlete's national Olympic committee will be the order of the day so that athletes avoid spending time with others they do not know.
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There will be precious little socializing in the Olympic village, for one very specific and controversial reason: vaccines are not mandatory at the Games, and even if an athlete is vaccinated, it appears he or she can still be ensnared in contact tracing should a person they have been in close contact with test positive for COVID-19, potentially jeopardizing their ability to compete.
Bottom line, the largest regularly scheduled peacetime gathering on earth will likely include almost no gathering. The esprit de corps that most athletes remember wistfully years after their Olympic experience will sadly be nonexistent this summer.
"It's sad that Olympic athletes this year are not going to have the same kind of experience those have had in the past," said Donna de Varona, who won two gold medals in swimming at the 1964 Tokyo Olympics and now serves on the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee board of directors. "One of the joys of the Olympic experience is being not just with your teammates but with athletes from all over the world. It's a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and it's not going to happen this time. The mingling, the sharing, getting a chance to meet athletes from so many other countries - that's what is going to be missing."
These will be a segmented Olympics, with almost no overlap between sports, meaning it could very well feel like 33 concurrent world championships - one for gymnastics, one for swimming, another for track and field, softball, soccer and so on.
In previous Games, it was an anticipated delight for athletes to attend other sporting events in other venues when their competitions were over. Not only will that not happen this time, it's possible that athletes won't even be allowed to show up at their own venue unless they are practicing or it's their day of competition, meaning, say, the entire U.S. swimming team would not be able to cheer on Katie Ledecky from the stands as it did Michael Phelps in previous Olympics.
How nations will keep their athletes separate for the usually-massive Opening Ceremony is another question entirely. As these Games are essentially a TV show, the Opening Ceremony must go on, but if the whole point of these Olympics is to keep athletes apart from each other and safe from COVID-19 and contact tracing, the Opening Ceremony could be nothing but trouble unless each nation circles the track, then leaves and goes right back to the village.
Competitors, coaches and officials also will not have the run of the city as they usually do at an Olympics. There will be no touring of Tokyo; organizers will not allow it. There will be no time spent with family and friends because there will be no family and friends at the Games. International travel to Tokyo has been forbidden for those without credentials at the Olympics, which start July 23 and end August 8.
What if an athlete decides he or she has had enough of these rules and wants to leave the village for a night on the town? Thousands have done that in previous Olympics. Not this time, not without severe consequences.
It's likely they'd first have to run the gauntlet of hall monitors to get off their floor and out of their building. If they succeeded at that, security at the Olympic village exit would record their escape - every Olympic credential includes a bar code - which means when they tried to re-enter hours later, they would be stopped and prevented from coming in due to the risk inherent with having left the Olympic bubble.
In this scenario, it's likely their clothing and belongings would be brought to them and they would have to find a hotel and a flight home. In a Summer Olympics that will be so very different, the repercussions for not following the rules will be that serious.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Opinion: Olympics likely to be the largest peacetime gathering with no gathering