 Hello and let's talk about the Olympics. The Tokyo Olympics, one of the biggest sporting events in the world, was scheduled to begin on July 24th this year. In ordinary times, we would have been following the action, the inspiring performances and the tragic misses by athletes. But these are no normal times. The pandemic has pushed the event by a year and it's now scheduled to begin on July 23rd, 2021. But in what form will it be held? Remains a big question. Will we have crossed the worst phase of the pandemic by then? Will a vaccine have arrived to give us hope? Many questions remain both for the International Olympic Committee, which organizes the event, the host team in Tokyo and the athletes around the world. We'll be looking into some of these issues, but first here are the details. The 32nd Olympics was scheduled to be held from 24th July, as we mentioned, to 9th August 2020. It will now be held from July 23rd to August 8th, 2021. This is the second time Tokyo will be hosting the Olympics after 1964. The 2020 summer Paralympics for disabled athletes will also be held in Tokyo from August 24th to September 5th next year. The Olympics is expected to have 339 events in 33 different sports and representatives from anywhere between 150 to 200 countries are likely to participate. Over 11,000 athletes are likely to take part. A major controversy has been over the participation of Russia, which is banned by the World Anti-Toping Agency for four years for allegedly tampering with data provided to the global body. Russian athletes may have to take part under some other banner, although Russia has appealed the decision. The economic impact of the postponement is very difficult to calculate. The official budget is 1.35 trillion yen, which is $12.6 billion. Although reports say that a much larger amount of money has already been spent on the whole process from the bid onwards. The estimates of the global economy of the country could suffer a $6 billion hit this year, although much of this may be recovered if that is held next year. Like we said, the key question of course is under what conditions this event will be held? Will there be crowds? Will there be international spectators? There are indeed many unknowns. We talk to news clicks, Leslie Xavier on this issue. Thank you, Leslie, for joining us. So the Olympic Games in a normal world would have started by now. The schedule date was July 24th this year. And of course, as we know, nothing is normal right now. And so the proposal, as far as I understand, is that it will be held next year, July 23rd. And so could you talk a bit about what has been happening in the Olympic circles, so to speak, regarding the postponement itself? What's the kind of thinking that's going on? And what is the planning going on for the proposed event next year? So the new dates, the games start exactly a day, exactly a year away from now. So I mean, it's on July 23rd, 2021. So last week on the 23rd, they had a small location. I mean, small, very subdued, because nobody was in the mood to celebrate or commemorate one year to go once again, because last year the same thing happened. And the circumstances are also pretty grim in that sense, because the world is still fighting. And I mean, if not exactly a losing cause, but still it's not under control the virus situation. So the stakeholders of the Olympic Games, IOC, the Japanese government, the organizing committee in Tokyo, they are all, I mean, pretty realistic about the scenarios. And in fact, Yoshihiro Mori, the organizing committee, president, he was quoted as saying by the Japanese official broadcaster NHK in one of the programs that it's not just about whether if and when and what Olympic Games, it's about humans winning a battle against this virus. So I mean, once that happens, then everything else will fall in place. So he was hinting at vaccine and being key to the fortunes of the Olympic Games as well. Having said that, the organizers are again looking beyond into a scenario where vaccine, I mean, even if it's not in place, how can they conduct the Games? Because IOC and generally it is understood that if the games are not held in the given dates next year, then it would be cancelled altogether because it's logistically calendar-wise everything impossible to organize it in any other dates. So and also the financial implications are also, I mean, the sponsors and all the infrastructure that have been put into organizing the event by the Japanese government. Everything is at stake here. So they are thinking of organizing it with the protocols in place, which ensures safety of the players, the officials. So I mean, in a normal Games, if it was held this year, I mean, this year, if then around 11,000 athletes, we would have seen can mean in Tokyo a support cast of around 40,000 officials plus, I mean, almost the same amount of volunteers and media persons. So it's so maybe a smaller kind of a setup. They are mulling in case vaccine is not out by then, where athletes would be allowed, they would ensure a green channel where athletes can be flown in and flown out. In fact, there are many countries who are thinking of bringing the athletes just for the event and taking them out just like that. Because this quarantine system won't work because logistically it would be a nightmare. 14 days coming in quarantine. It's not like how the West Indies travel to England and they add the luxury because it's just two teams and 15 of 15 players involved. This is huge. So testing would be done and players would be thrown in competitions will happen. Maybe spectators may not be allowed to travel foreign spectators, but Japanese spectators might be allowed in because IOC again is very clear that they wouldn't hold the games without spectators. But again foreign spectators bringing in is again a point of contention, a point of doubt. And as far as within the stadium, athletes be able to be concerned. Of course, a lot of action has started to create football. So there are certain protocols that have been established which would be, which the athletes would be expected to follow within the stadium, including celebrations like shouting, things like that, including that, including behavior in the games village where physical distancing would be implemented. So things like that are being mulled as plan B. But of course the weight is on for the vaccine to come out. So to just go a bit more into this, the Olympics as we understand is not only event for two weeks, it's also something and you've written about this. It's also something that has a long-term impact on athletes' careers and development itself and is actually a cyclical process in that sense because it's not just about the competition. So can you talk a bit about how that aspect might be impacted if, for instance, it doesn't happen? So one direct implication is the financial implication. And when we talk about financial implication, the first thing and the foremost thing that everyone talks about is the losses suffered by the organizers, by the sponsors and all that. But the revenue generated from the Olympic Games, the cut goes to the International Olympic Committee. And so IOC, what it uses, I mean it uses it for its own functioning. And at the same time, it has a lot of developmental programs across the world. And especially countries, the poorer countries benefit from it a lot. The athletes get a share of the money for sporting activities. And also that falls into the Olympic cycle as such because this is a junior grassroots development program. So it's a long-term investment for IOC in that sense or for the sporting movement in that sense because in the long run these athletes are expected to come up and increase the reach and the stature of the Olympic movement as such. So that entire cyclic process which has been, which is a four year cycle, will get disrupted if the games, the chain of games are broken. And at the same time, it's also evident that whenever the Olympic Games have been broken, the larger implication is that the world has not been in a great shape when this has happened. So the two times it has been cancelled happens to be during the World War. And of course, those days, the world being not as small as it is now. The cascading implications of it was, and Olympic movement was also at a pretty nascent stage. So the cascading implication of it on a global scale was pretty minimal that way because for instance, if you look at the 40 and 44 games being cancelled, India being a, I mean, having not gained independence at that point and sport definitely not exactly being a priority at that moment. Sport development programs and all that were not in place, things like that. And also not connected with the IOC in any man. IOC never had stakes in all this country development programs. So impact remained with the games itself and the organizing city, but now it's a different state altogether. The effect is not just confined to Tokyo, the effect would be global. And that would last a few games cycle, if not more, as far as the development, the stunting of the development is concerned. And finally, just a quick look on what's happening to some of the significant important Indian athletes who are supposed to participate, where have they reached with regards to their preparation, their careers and how is this whole process actually, it has a derail, their training and stuff like that. So it's a derailment as has happened with time. Many of the athletes were in camp, continue being in camps, but then things have started getting to them, psychologically, physically also, because training is not exactly in the intensity that is supposed to be. And psychologically, in the sense they are away from families and some, I mean, the related pressures that come with it, some of the family being family members, Okin being in places where pandemic is on the rise, they are tensed about all those things. And how long can I, I mean, it's like solitary confinement in a way also, right? How long can an athlete remain in a camp kind of a facility with no external contact as such? So there have been a few athletes who have asked permission to leave, go home. Many have left home even without permissions. Many are mulling, things like that. And we at Newsclick, we broke a story about Bajrang Punea who was a medal meaning prospect for Tokyo, world number two wrestler. And so his coach is a Georgian and he had flown back to Georgia in March. Now he's coming back on July 30, he will land in Delhi, he has made some arrangement with the Georgian government to come back a special case because Bajrang Punea as far as his training is concerned is struggling and wrestling being the high intensity sport that is and also the reality that in the coming months there won't be much competition for him or any of the elite wrestlers in the country. And by elite wrestlers we know for sure that some of them are medal, I mean, sure shot bets for medals, right, at the game. So him coming back, I mean, that is one positive, possibly for Bajrang because then at least some sort of control and because Bajrang has risen to world number one stature and one world championship medal, some of the discourse, the trust between them, the relationship between them is huge. So that would make a difference. So individually, there are certain movements that are happening towards training and all that. But at the same time, I came to know that wrestling or any sport for that matter, the variations are very, very ununderstandably very reserved about opening up and training full-fledged and also very reserved about taking these athletes abroad to train. For instance, there is this suggestion by Bajrang's coach again that Georgia is in a better place according to him to train because the country is in the green as far as COVID cases are concerned compared to India. And he can ensure safety, he said, but then permissions are not there. And in some ways that is right too because probably the government feels or the sports ministry feels that it would be better off if they have direct control over the athletes' circumstances, being in a camp here or being in some private facility where safety and all other protocols can be directly monitored by the sports ministry or the sports authority of India. So that is one case. And there is another, I mean, sort of like a landmark now that we have very few sporting landmarks. And India actually competed for the first time since since since lockdown. Shravaninanda, who is from Orissa, she is a 100-meter runner, Olympian, and she shifted to Jamaica to train at the start of this year. From January, she has been dazed in Kingston. And so she competed in a local race there and becoming the first Indian athlete to compete for the COVID outbreak. She finished third in her heats for the record that way. And when I say local competition in Jamaica, it's by no means a small competition because in that field, there was the reigning Olympic champion running the race too. So a good experience for Shravaninanda out. And then she was quoted in the agencies about her training and how she's lucky. I mean, it's a luck and chance kind of a scene because Jamaica is a better off country that way, as far as COVID infections are concerned. And it's also a better off country for any athlete to train because we are talking about training and competing and brushing your shoulders with world-level athletes, world champions all over the place. So that is one small significant positive we'll look at sporting. But at the same time, at the administrative level, a lot of muck has been thrown around in India because Indian Olympic Association is in a big turmoil. The president of the Iowa as well as the secretary general, they are divided into camps and they are fighting each other, throwing allegations and showing proof of misdemeanors and all that. So that is, I mean, at this out of crisis, I mean, our administrators being like such, it's unfortunate because this is the hour that they should come together and plan so that our guys, I mean, our medal-of-fals as well as the normal athletes or even at the grassroots, whoever the kids who are coming up and all that they should, they need all the support, all the guidance, all the structural, the way, the structure for a way forward that should be in place and it can only be planned by systematically by the people who are in the chair, occupying the chairs now, but they are busy fighting each other. So that's, that's on the administrative front. So this is one or less a quick update on what is happening on the India scene. Thank you Leslie, so much for talking to us. Newsclick Sports Desk is releasing a series of features around the Olympics. To read them, do visit newsclick.in slash sports. Our next story is on the COVID-19 impact in South Africa. The countries among the worst affected by the pandemic and as the fifth highest number of cases and of yesterday had the fourth highest number of new cases. To know more about this, we talked to Dr. Lydia Kaincross of the People's Health Movement last week. Here is a section of the interview. Could you talk a bit maybe about what's the situation on the ground right now because we do know that the government has been pushing for reopening and interestingly, South Africa was one of the countries which did have a very strong lockdown. So how is it that despite that, the number of cases continues? Yeah, I think South Africa, you know, we started off with the, with the approach to the pandemic of a very strict and very hard lockdown, one of the hardest in the world for about five weeks. And during that time, there was a quite slow transmission of the virus. We think that because it was mainly sort of initially a middle-class inoculation into the society, and we have a very class-segregated society, which is the legacy of apartheid and of capitalism. And so for some time, the lockdown worked. But the lockdown came at tremendous cost, tremendous cost to primarily the poor, the poor Black majority in South Africa. And it revealed the tremendous food insecurity within the country and income insecurity. And the state was not able to rapidly move to fill those gaps. So there was a pressure to lift lockdown both from a conservative sort of a capital economy lobby, which wanted to get profit going and get factories running. But there was also a pressure from the ground from people who were starving, who actually were unable to fulfill their normal livelihoods, which was the microeconomy in the townships, the informal economy, which had been decimated by the lockdown. And of course, what we had needed at that stage was a very strong social support package to come in rapidly, to support income security, to support food security, to bring to communities water and food and sanitation and money to allow them to survive the lockdown. But we were unable to make that shift. And so there was this pressure and a fairly uncoordinated opening of the economy. Sort of the strongest lobby pushing would get their sector open. So one of the first areas to open was mining, which makes no sense in terms of a health and epidemiology point of view. And then opening of churches and opening of big sectors of the economy that were not necessarily what we would consider to be essentials for life, which is a more kind of social perspective on what do we need to survive and what can we keep closed in order to keep us safe. The other problem was that we didn't utilize the lockdown as we should have. So the lockdown time was really an opportunity to get two things going. The one is a mass popular education campaign to empower communities to understand the virus, to begin to know how when lockdown lifted, how to move safely in the presence of the virus. And that mass campaign has still not happened. And there are pockets of education happening by NGOs, social movements, health ourselves, but not nearly enough. And the other thing that needed to happen in that time was mass testing, tracing, and quarantine. And our testing capacity really failed us at this time. And because we were not able to escape the logic of the capitalist system and bring together our public and private testing capacity, we still had a two system binary with private sector capacity, with short turnaround times and a few hours to one day or so. And the public sector capacity was just totally overstretched by the numbers. So we got our community health workers out there, they screened and they sent for testing. And within a few weeks, we overwhelmed our testing capacity. So when we started to open up the economy, we didn't have the testing capacity that we needed to be able to test and to separate out those that were sick and take care of them in that way. So here we are now we have we're number five in the world. Our peak is coming later in other countries, but it's coming. And, you know, the numbers are always contested and the deaths are contested as well. But we are seeing this in our hospitals. So we are seeing the epidemic in for a long time our hospitals were quiet from a COVID point of view. But certainly started in the Western Cape province and now is moved to our most densely populated province in Houting. And the hospitals are seeing the influx of patients with with COVID symptoms sort of way. So it's here. You can watch the full interview at NewsClick's YouTube channel. That's all we have time for today. We'll be back tomorrow with major news developments from the country. Until then keep watching NewsClick.