Ringless summer

At least there will be an Olympics, some summer. So COVID-19 has not precisely hurled us backward 40 years, among its other dubious achievements.

Forty years ago, see, the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, and an American president again injected politics into an enterprise that had always been a political instrument, despite all the willful obliviousness of crusty old Avery Brundage and others.  Jimmy Carter decreed that the United States would boycott the Moscow Olympics, and an entire army of young athletes who had dreamed of marching into some ringing stadium under a five-ringed banner was told to cool its jets.

Some people hated that. Some thought it was a shame, but sport is only sport, and there were greater moral imperatives for a nation that still had some. Opinions varied.

In the end, of course, the boycott only led to a Soviet boycott of the Los Angeles Olympics four years later. It did not chase the Soviets out of Afghanistan; the forerunners of al Qaeda, armed by America and then abandoned by her, did that. In so doing, they hastened the end of the Soviet regime the American boycott was protesting to begin with.

This is not that. This is merely a date on a calendar. The 2020 Tokyo Olympics will now become the 2021 Tokyo Olympics, and the Games will go on.

And yet ...

And yet, it's one more piece of the normal we will miss.

Already the Masters and the Kentucky Derby and the baseball season have been displaced, and the rest of hockey and basketball have vanished entirely. The Indianapolis 500, which annually puts 250,000 souls in a confined, if sprawling, place, will likely be next. We'll have to see. This is an undiscovered country we are in, and there are no signposts.

In the meantime, we'll wait for 2021, and the resumption of running and jumping and throwing and throwing hands, of another 500 broken swimming records, of the U.S. taking on the world in a game it invented (basketball) but which the world has made its own, And, of course, of tiny waifs tumbling and rowers rowing and archers archer-ing, and everything else we've come to love about the Olympics.

We'll wait for 2021, and better days than these.