After a year-long postponement due to the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic, the 2020 Tokyo Olympics will officially kick off Friday, July 23 with the opening ceremony.<\/p>\n
Like many things over the past year and a half, these games will be unprecedented in nature.<\/p>\n
While spectators have been banned from all Olympic venues, Olympic Village will be far from empty, with about 11,500 athletes expected to compete in Japan. Another estimated 79,000 journalists, officials and staff are also expected to be in attendance.<\/p>\n
Among the competitors, Team Canada is sending 371 athletes to the Tokyo Olympics, the country\u2019s largest Olympic contingent since the 1984 Los Angeles Summer Games.<\/p>\n
Brock University has numerous experts available to speak with the media in the lead-up to and during the Olympic and Paralympic Games on a variety of subjects:<\/p>\n
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Sport psychology<\/strong><\/p>\n \u201cWith respect to sport psychology and performing under pressure, this is going to be a very different type of Olympics,\u201d says Brock University Department of Kinesiology Chair and Professor Philip Sullivan. \u201cThe athlete\u2019s cycle has already been set off a year, and now, with no audiences and the possibility of testing positive for COVID-19 in the back of everyone\u2019s minds, these athletes are having to deal with stressors we\u2019ve never seen before.\u201d<\/p>\n In terms of the mental toughness, high-performance athletes are used to \u201cstaying in the zone,\u201d while competing under difficult conditions and planning ahead for stressors such as adjusting to different time zones, different food and sleep patterns, he says.<\/p>\n \u201cIn Tokyo, we may see very different types of performance because of the \u2018what ifs\u2019 and lack of spectators,\u201d Sullivan says. \u201cFor example, if you are a swimmer, you are used to tuning out spectator noise to some extent, but it\u2019s often a part of the training environment, and so familiar. The idea of not having spectators is all new.\u201d<\/p>\n Testing for COVID-19 is another unknown to contend with along with the potential timing of those results.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat happens to the athlete who is leading a competition and halfway through a COVID-19 test comes back positive and they are removed?\u201d says Sullivan. \u201cOr what\u2019s going to happen, when it\u2019s 30 minutes before a wrestling match and you\u2019re told you can\u2019t compete? How do you mentally prepare for that?\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Branding and sponsorship issues<\/strong><\/p>\n Also watching these games carefully is Assistant Professor of Sport Management Michael Naraine, who is interested in learning which brands will withdraw their advertising from the Games.<\/p>\n He points out that each Olympic Games have top-level sponsors, such as this year\u2019s contingent including Toyota, Samsung and Panasonic. But Toyota, which joined the Olympic Partner programme in 2015 as the first-ever mobility partner, announced this week it was cancelling television advertisements and its CEO won\u2019t attend opening ceremony as a result of the deep unpopularity of the Tokyo Olympics in the host country of Japan, where residents fear that staging the Games will further fuel a rise in Delta variant COVID-19 infections.<\/p>\n \u201cThe Toyota Olympic Worldwide Paralympic partnership was supposed to be a type of coming out party for the brand as they debuted vehicles, mobility support robots and mobility services,\u201d Naraine says. \u201cToyota actively distancing themselves from the Games early is an attempt to help its brand with the Japanese people. It will be interesting to see if others do the same.\u201d<\/p>\n Naraine expects many of the brands associated with the Olympics are currently assessing whether they will see a return on their investment or deem the Games too high risk to continue supporting.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Gender equity<\/strong><\/p>\n The International Olympic Committee (IOC) is saying Tokyo 2020 will be the most gender equal Games ever. The IOC has introduced a number of relatively superficial and performative changes, such as encouraging each country to select both a male and female flag bearer. More substantially, each nation has been encouraged to send at least one male and one female athlete as part of its delegation.<\/p>\n Sport Management Assistant Professor Michele Donnelly says more needs to be done.<\/p>\n \u201cWhile these are positive moves toward gender equality, they ignore really significant inequalities in many of the events on the Olympic programme including uniforms, rules, equipment, race distances and more,\u201d Donnelly says. \u201cThese differences in the conditions of men\u2019s and women\u2019s participation need attention in order to claim that the Olympic Games are truly gender equal.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Environmental issues<\/strong><\/p>\n Heat will be the biggest environmental challenge to athlete performance and health at these Games, says Department of Kinesiology Professor Stephen Cheung, an expert in environmental physiology.<\/p>\n Heat can drastically decrease performance capacity in both elite and recreational athletes across all outdoor sports.<\/p>\n \u201cCanadian athletes and sport scientists have been at the forefront of applied research and techniques to reduce heat impact and optimize performance over the past several decades of international competitions,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n Cheung is available to speak about what happens to athletes when their bodies get too hot; how much hydration is really needed during physical activity in the heat; strategies for adapting to the heat; and how to stay cool in high temperatures.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Socio-economic impacts<\/strong><\/p>\n Associate Professor of Sport Management and Director of Brock\u2019s Centre for Sport Capacity Julie Stevens studies how people perceive the economic, social and environmental impact of sporting events and what the key considerations are when bidding for and hosting these events.<\/p>\n \u201cPrior to the pandemic, projections indicated global sport tourism would experience double-digit growth and this would be driven by an increasing number of sport events,\u201d Stevens says. \u201cThe appeal of the Olympics is its high profile and media exposure that capture international attention and improve public image of the host city. Given Tokyo Games authorities have closed the sport venues to spectators and no international tourists are allowed to enter the country, benefits such as economic and social impacts remain uncertain.\u201d<\/p>\n She says economic impact studies of these large-scale sport events typically demonstrate the rise in economic activity, but this is mainly based upon visitor spending.<\/p>\n \u201cWith Tokyo and many other venue locations under lockdown regulations, organizers will need to expand how they assess the impact of the Games. The perceptions of residents will matter,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n Stevens also researches sport tourism and other ways sport supports economic growth within a region.<\/p>\n \u201cGiven the Tokyo Games\u2019 economic activity for tourism will likely be low, it is also valuable to explore other ways hosting the Games helps Japan\u2019s and Tokyo\u2019s economy such as through business opportunities related to sectors including infrastructure and construction, technology, media and manufacturing, for example,\u201d she says. \u201cA broader perspective on the impact of this large-scale event will be needed.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Media impact<\/strong><\/p>\n Also available to speak with the media is Assistant Professor of Sport Management Olan Scott, whose research focuses on how media communications shape and reflect issues of national identity, gender and race in the context of globally significant sporting events.<\/p>\n He\u2019ll be watching how broadcasters frame Olympic coverage from a nationalistic and gendered perspective.<\/p>\n \u201cMy research has identified nationalistic bias in a variety of Olympic and Commonwealth Games and how male and female athletes were portrayed by announcers,\u201d says Scott.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" After a year-long postponement due to the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic, the 2020 Tokyo Olympics will officially kick off Friday, July 23 with the opening ceremony.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":29,"featured_media":70144,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[36,7,3319,1,5],"tags":[10477,3696,8568,8463,10554,4883,4327,2998,10553],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73295"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/29"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=73295"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73295\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":73310,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73295\/revisions\/73310"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/70144"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=73295"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=73295"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=73295"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}