Why the Tokyo Olympic Games failed to be a big cultural moment

Despite the best work of marketing departments, culture has yet to become a lifestyle choice. It’s still not one of life’s “bonus features” we’re meant to opt into it. Rather, it grows organically around us but also from us. Gandhi called it that which “resides in the heart and in the soul of its people” but to that, we might add that it inhabits those objects in which we find a shared satisfaction. 

It’s why, one might suppose, the Citizenship Test ask such odd questions. Identifying as “British” means much more than being able to identify H.M. the Queen from a line-up. It means knowing the significance of Bet Lynch, being able to recite the punchline to a Peter Kay routine or know never to trust a weather forecast from a man called Fish. That’s what culture means and, perhaps, has always meant. Shakespeare didn’t write King Lear assuming people might be familiar with the doddery old king. He wrote it with the absolute certainty that his audience already knew the story. He’d taken the plot of Lear – along with some of his other plays – from Holinshed’s Chronicles, a compendium of traditional tales of British history. The same was true of nearly all his work, which referenced the classic literature of the time.

Like most writers before and since, Shakespeare wrote out of a tradition in which certain stories were as well known to his contemporaries as the Moon Landing is known to us. This has always been how literature works. We call it “intertextuality”, which is a clever way of saying that books refer to other books and are referenced by yet more books going forward. 

Yet it’s not just books that work this way. Our whole culture is a unique tapestry of intertextual significance. Films are reliant on film history to entertain. Indiana Jones is a new version of 1930s serial adventures. Even the best of Quentin Tarantino is rooted in the bad exploitation movies of the 60s and 70s. 

Even comedians do the same with their routines, though their remit is much broader. There’s hardly anything more uniquely British than Billy Connolly famously mocking the dullness of the national anthem and, in the process, explaining why Daley Thompson looked so bored after receiving his Decathlon gold medal in the 1984 Olympics.

Yet it’s doubtful if many memorable jokes will be made about the 2020 Tokyo Olympic Games. 

It’s not just the choice of a host city on the other side of the world that’s the problem as much as the BBC’s woeful attempts to cover the Olympics. There has been very little to draw us together beyond taking to social media and complaining that we’ve missed our favourite sport. In cultural terms, there will be a small black hole where the summer of 2021 once sat.

In case you don’t know, back in 2015, the BBC was trapped between the ethos of a public service broadcaster and the expectations of an audience who wanted them to compete in a commercial world. As a result, they were outbid and, with a £920m pan-European deal, Discovery has now locked the bulk of the Tokyo Olympic Games behind a paywall. This hasn’t sat well with viewers who, after London and Rio, had become accustomed to certain sports being free to air. This time the BBC has been allowed to only broadcast two live events, and one of those is always behind the “red button”. For most viewers, it simply hasn’t been good enough. 

There is an argument that people could have a paid to watch Eurosport but that overlooks the significance of the communal experience open to all. Paying for the Tokyo Olympic Games feels like we’re being asked to pay for membership to a cultural event and, indeed, a British identity. That doesn’t seem right. Nor does it appear to fit in with the government’s promise to protect the very biggest events, often called the “crown jewels of sport”. It’s not about stepping in the way of the free market but ensuring that we retain a space where we come together. 

The rules around that are laid out in Ofcom’s Code on Sports and Other Listed and Designated Events, one of the most unreadable documents this side of a Dead Sea Scroll. However, if you read it, you’ll see that there are two categories of broadcaster. The first covers free-to-air services (BBC, ITV, Channel 4, Channel 5). Then there are the rest. At times the legalese is sure to give you a headache but here’s a readable sample:

“A broadcaster providing a service in either category (‘the first service’) is prohibited from showing exclusively live coverage of the whole or any part of a Group A event without the previous consent of Ofcom unless a broadcaster providing a service in the other category (‘the second service’) has acquired the right to show live coverage of the event or the same part of the event.”

Which, in English, means that a pay-to-view channel cannot acquire the rights to the Tokyo Olympic Games (a Group A event) without one of the free-to-view channels also acquiring the rights. Sounds straightforward thus far. The next bit is even more clear.

“The area served by the second service must consist of or include the whole, or substantially the whole, of the area served by the first service.”

Without getting into the subsequent legalise which goes to great lengths to confuse what denotes “live”, it must be asked whether the BBC in any way has provided “the whole, or substantially the whole, of the area served by the first service”. Has BBC broadcast come close to broadcasting a substantial part of what is available on Eurosport? At the time of writing, Eurosport is showing live and simultaneously via its website: three channels of athletics, two of climbing, the pole vault, the shot put, wrestling, baseball, horse jumping, weightlifting, hammer, football, handball, beach volleyball, basketball, and non-beach volleyball. Meanwhile, available on the BBC: one channel for athletics and football on the red button.

Does any of that feel like a reasonable interpretation of the rules?

Common sense would tell us why the rules were written as they’re written. They’re meant to give us choice. Just because a sport is “protected” doesn’t mean we should all be forced to stick with the BBC’s coverage if some other company wishes to offer an alternative. Yet rules still seem to suggest that we should be given a substantial part of the games live. Indeed, OFCOM states that the “interests of viewers lie in allowing them to participate in the event as it happens, as far as possible”. It doesn’t appear to be designed to limit what we see and, certainly, shouldn’t constrict us to a few top tier events for hours on end. Even golf took a big slice of the live coverage, which seems like a particularly egregious decision to deprive the smaller sports of their chance to for national coverage. 

It is also another lost opportunity to share an experience as a nation that was designed to be experienced as a nation. Too much of our world is already fractured, either economically or politically. Facebook and Twitter offer content curated by algorithms that do not aim to express a shared worldview but, rather, push us further into our lonely niches. Very few things bring us together and now we no longer have the Tokyo Olympic Games to do that.

We can only hope the real crown jewels are protected better than the government protects the crown jewels of sport otherwise, at this rate, they’ll be in a private collection somewhere east of Moscow before the year is out.