Here’s a question: Why have the Olympics and their affiliated organizations lost public trust and how come doubts have been raised about their importance to society.

The Japanese Olympic Committee (JOC), having given up on Sapporo’s bid to host the Winter Olympics, is embarking on a project to review its troubled campaign and ponder the future of its involvement in the Olympic movement. The JOC says it will spend a year discussing related issues.

The problem is that the project’s purpose and themes are unclear. Even though details of the plans are still being worked out, Olympic executives need to offer more than vague and elusive ideas about what this undertaking is all about, certainly something more concrete and substantial than stating “not a verification but a reflection to take a positive view.”

The backlash against Sapporo’s bid to host the Winter Games was due to sordid stories about the campaign and business deals concerning the Tokyo Olympics held in 2021.

From allegations of bribery related to the capital’s successful campaign to host the Summer Games to confusion in operating the gigantic event amid the COVID-19 pandemic and multiple corruption and bid-rigging scandals, Tokyo 2020 was plagued by all kinds of ethical and compliance violations as well as management issues. As a result, there was deep distrust in officialdom.

Separate from legal proceedings, the JOC must conduct a sweeping review of the sports extravaganza to reconsider the social and other benefits of hosting the Olympics and related management approaches.

Furthermore, during the latter half of the Sapporo bid, a series of blunders committed by the JOC, which serves as the interface with the International Olympic Committee (IOC), added to the challenges the campaign for the Sapporo Winter Olympics was grappling with.

For example, despite JOC President Yasuhiro Yamashita stating it was “unlikely that the venues for both the 2030 and 2034 Winter Games would be decided at the same time," the IOC session shortly after decided on the cities to host these events.

Despite shifting its target to the Games after 2034, Sapporo was excluded from the list of candidates and not even invited to present its case.

The question is why Sapporo, once considered a frontrunner, was left out in the cold. What kind of information-gathering and analysis efforts did the JOC make, and how did it communicate with the IOC?

Amid growing international distrust of the IOC, an objective and rigorous assessment of the JOC’s campaign for Sapporo by an independent body is indispensable.

This is also vital for the JOC’s relationship of trust with the Sapporo municipal government, which spent a massive amount of money on the bid.

With the Paris Olympics in July drawing near and senior executives and secretariat staff of the JOC busy with tasks related to sending a delegation to France, there are naturally doubts about whether the organization is ready for in-depth discussion on the Sapporo debacle.

If they are betting that the brilliant performances of Japanese athletes in Paris will make public memories of the failure fade and restore trust in the Olympics and JOC, they are grossly mistaken.

The JOC was initially a division of the Japan Amateur Sports Association (now the Japan Sport Association, or JSPC), but it became independent in 1989 following the forced decision to boycott the 1980 Moscow Olympics in line with the central government’s policy. However, it has remained heavily reliant on government subsidies and a ragtag team composed of people from various sports associations for over 30 years.

The JOC’s role and presence are continuing to diminish. It is questionable whether the current system, under which the JOC and the JSPC both serve as command centers and guide various sports associations that work on the front lines of sports, can keep up with rapid changes occurring in the world of Olympics and sports.

There is no immediate possibility of hosting the Olympics in Japan. Now is the time for the JOC and other Olympic-related organizations to reflect on the traditional thinking that prioritizes the Olympics above all else and consider how sports can contribute to society without promoting organizations becoming obsessed with hosting the Games. They need to ponder all these questions and issues from a broad perspective without getting trapped in a self-righteous mindset so that they can envision a better future for the entire world of sports.

--The Asahi Shimbun, March 9