PIERS MORGAN: The boring Tokyo Olympics opening ceremony proved why Games should be cancelled 

I’m not yawning… YOU’RE yawning.

Be honest, we were all bloody falling asleep during that endlessly downbeat and dreary opening ceremony for the Tokyo Olympics.

It was like watching the Eurovision Song Contest – an annual competition between the most god-awful singers in each European country – with just a handful of smug old farts in suits for an audience, and only attended by the few contestants who could be bothered to turn up.

By comparison to the joyous and spectacular fervor of the opening ceremonies for the past two Olympics in Rio and London, this was frankly an embarrassing snoozefest.

And aside from the tedious ‘entertainment’ – since when was a guy running on a treadmill supposed to thrill the soul? – it just felt so jarringly wrong to observe a soulless procession of gurning flag-waving athletes waving to a sea of silent fake fan faces in the empty 68,000 seats, with a tiny crowd of under 1000 made up solely of privileged foreign dignitaries and diplomats including Japan’s Emperor Naruhito and America’s First Lady Jill Biden, International Olympic Committee members and Olympic sponsors.

Though the latter didn’t include any executives from key sponsor Toyota, the largest carmaker in Japan and main supplier of cars for the Games, who pulled Japanese TV ads about the Olympics for fear of alienating its local market as polls show 70% of Japanese people don’t want the Games to go ahead.

‘Over 4 billion people across the world will be watching these Olympic Games,’ Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga told NBC News before the ceremony. ‘In that context, overcoming the hardship of the coronavirus and to be able to hold the Games, I think there is real value in that.’

Is there, Prime Minister?

What real value is there in an event that turns into a public health and public relations fiasco because you decided to prioritise money ahead of lives?

News | Daily Mail Online

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