No sex. No cheering. Eat alone. If competitors and support staff at this summer's Covid-affected Tokyo Olympics don't abide by these rules and many others, they risk getting kicked out.
The latest ‘Playbook’ of rules for the 90,500 overseas visitors to the Games - 11,500 athletes plus 79,000 coaches, support staff and officials - is explicit in stating this in a section headlined: ‘Non-respect of the Playbook’.
‘Failure to comply with these rules may result in disciplinary consequences,’ it says, listing just some of the things that might land you in trouble, from refusing to take a daily Covid test, to ‘intentionally disrespecting mask wearing’ to not adhering to social distancing.
The main dining hall in the Olympic Village at Tokyo 2020, where athletes will have to eat alone
Competitors will have to comply with extreme restrictions at the Games because of Covid
The penalties range from warnings to fines to exclusion from the Games, to disqualification if an ‘offence’ happens after an individual’s competition is finished.
The sex ban has been alluded to by the organisers in several ways. The latest Playbook says attendees must ‘avoid physical contact, including hugs and handshakes’, and ‘keep physical interactions with others to a minimum’.
Since the Seoul Olympics in 1988, Games organisers have given away hundreds of thousands of condoms to promote safe sex at Olympic villages packed with thousands of the fittest young men and women in the world. Tokyo’s organising committee have scrapped their plan to give away 160,000 condoms this time, saying they will instead be given out when athletes go home.
For the first time in any sporting event’s history, all attendees are obliged to own a smartphone, on which it is mandatory to install two Apps, one of which is daily health checker, the other to track and trace. You must enter the results of your daily Covid test as well as your temperature and other details about your well-being every day.
People from different delegations wait for Covid test results on arrival at Narita airport
If you don’t own a smartphone, you have to rent one on arrival and cannot leave the airport without one, with the Apps installed, also having shown proof of a negative test within 72 hours of departure to Japan. A further test is conducted on arrival at and that too must be negative before you can board a Games-approved vehicle to go to your accommodation. Using public transport is not allowed.
By Friday, there had been at least seven Covid cases in Japan among foreign Games
