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Indian Olympic faithful feel the pain as Tokyo bars its doors
Organisers of the Tokyo Olympics have announced that overseas spectators will not be allowed at the Games over Covid-19 fears.
For a man who has been to every Summer Olympics since 2000 and attended a bunch of cricket and football World Cups in the last two decades, Om Mundra vividly remembers a day at the 2014 Commonwealth Games in Glasgow. Feeling the tension from the stands of a deciding game in the men’s badminton final between Parupalli Kashyap and Singapore’s Derek Wong, Mundra realised the Indian could do with some extra cheering from Indian fans. And from a few Scottish fans who had come in to watch the gold medal clash.
“I requested all the Scottish spectators who were sitting around me to support our Indian. From then on, every point he (Kashyap) won had a louder cheer. And he won that tight last game (21-19),” Mundra recalled.
As things stand, Mundra will not be able to provide such support in Tokyo this year. On Friday, Japan announced that international spectators will be barred from Tokyo for the postponed Olympics starting in July as well as the Paralympics that will follow due to pandemic concerns. According to AP news agency, about one million tickets have been sold to foreign fans. Mundra is in that list, among approximately 500 Indians who had purchased tickets for the Tokyo Olympics, according to Raghav Gupta, founder and CEO, Fanatic Sports, the country's Authorised Ticket Reseller (ATR) for the Games.
The 71-year-old Mundra has attended every Summer and Winter Olympics since 2000 Sydney, enjoying every bit of his experience as a fan or volunteer. Little did he know that things would be drastically different for what would be his sixth Olympics when he completed all his bookings—event tickets, accommodation and flights—in 2019. Last March, when the Tokyo Olympics were pushed back by a year, Mundra cancelled his Singapore Airlines ticket and used the refund to book a Mumbai-Tokyo ANA flight for July 2021.
He had an eerie feeling last month when he received a message from the airlines that his ticket would be cancelled as they may not be able to operate the flight under the current circumstances. On Friday, the writing was on his mailbox—that foreign spectators were barred and his Olympics tickets would be refunded.
“I feel a little hurt but there’s nothing we can do about the situation,” Mundra, a resident of Nagpur, said.
Mundra and his co-travelling group of around eight people had spent approximately R6 lakh to book tickets for different events at Tokyo. He is optimistic that most of that money will be refunded, although he isn’t sure of receiving a full refund of the accommodation booking money.
He is still hoping for a miraculous Tokyo trip through a last-minute decision change from the organisers or via a different route (volunteer, etc). “You do not get that raw emotion watching the action from TV. The feel just isn’t the same,” Mundra said.
The feel won’t be the same in Georgia, USA, too where Vipul Patel lives. The 48-year-old Tanzania-born residing in Toccoa had been looking forward to boarding the flight to Tokyo for a year-and-a-half. He went to the 2016 Rio Games as a volunteer for the opening ceremony and stayed back as a spectator. It was a reunion 20 years in the making; Patel’s only Olympics experience before that was watching Leander Paes win bronze at the 1996 Games in Atlanta, some 100 miles (160 km) from Toccoa.
“My mother wanted to watch tennis, but we didn’t have a lot of money back then. But she told me, “we have $100, we will manage somehow”. When we went to the (Stone Mountain) tennis centre it was raining, so a lot of people started selling tickets for a cheap price to see other events. We ended up watching Leander winning the bronze,” Patel said.
His hotel business having flourished since, Patel has catered to the sports fanatic in him, having been to cricket and football World Cups and Grand Slams, including the 2019 Wimbledon and French Open. He believes few things can match the Olympics atmosphere. “The colour, the crowd, the culture, the food, interacting with people of various countries—the atmosphere at an Olympics is completely different,” he said. “I’ll miss it badly this time, but it is what it is.”
It’s to soak in that atmosphere that Shridhar Purohit, a Nagpur lawyer, booked his tickets for Tokyo. A football buff who has been to FIFA World Cups, he’d only heard how special it is to attend the Olympics from his friends, and wanted a taste of it. For the 60-year-old though, the wait will now stretch till 2024.
“It’s very disappointing. Such things are a lifetime experience. The Olympics come once in four years and who knows how I’ll be or how the world will be in four years. Agar haath-pau chal rahe hai toh Paris pakka jayenge (if I can move around alright, I’ll surely go to Paris),” Purohit said.
The Fanatic Sports CEO said the refunded ticket amount from the Tokyo organisers will be passed on to the customers, though he is waiting confirmation on the process. “It’s very disheartening that Indians won’t get a chance to cheer for their athletes. A lot of people who booked through us were really excited about Tokyo before the pandemic hit us. We hope the enthusiasm increases for Paris now,” Gupta said.
