When the alarm clock rings at 7 o'clock in the morning, the first thought after a week on site is: don't forget to spit. That's not what you might think. We journalists on site are obliged to take a saliva sample ourselves every morning, spit it into a tube, seal it, label it with a barcode, put it in a bag and hand it in to the responsible team at the Olympic harbour. The sample must first be registered in the system provided for this purpose. Then, in a second system called Ocha, you have to register your own state of health with various details on a form. Anyone who forgets to do this is immediately "shouted at" by the system with red notices. Once everything is done, you leave the small room in one of the two hotels prescribed by the organisers for the sailing media and go to the lobby. The "breakfast" has to be cancelled. The offer consists of a handful of items wrapped in plastic, which are supposed to be bread rolls. Plastic in the form of packaging material is so ubiquitous here that one wonders how the avalanche can ever be stopped, which at the end of the chain also contaminates the seas on which Olympic medals are sailed here.
The bus is already waiting for the crowd of around twelve international photographers and reporters, who are only allowed to travel to the Olympic harbour by this means of transport. Our radius of movement is restricted by regulation to the hotel, bus and the Olympic port (where only the media centre and the so-called mixed zone, where you can meet the Olympians under observation, are located). We are not allowed to move around in public for 14 days - i.e. for the entire duration of the Olympic Games and our stay in Japan - in accordance with the quarantine requirements of the hosts. The hotel does not have a restaurant. In the evening, if there is time in view of the mountains of work, we order a dish via Uber Eats, which is not always exactly identifiable. This can sometimes go wrong when interpreting the Japanese characters among the photographed dishes. A British AP photographer didn't get the one dish he wanted despite help at the hotel lobby, but "tonnes of dishes", he said with a laugh. The only place we are allowed to buy drinks or snacks every day is the 7/11 next door. Even in this shop, whose staff are very helpful, there is more plastic than goods.
The bus takes 35 to 45 minutes to the Olympic harbour. On the way there, we pick up colleagues from the second permitted hotel for sailing reporters and photographers. During the journey, we see through the windows what we are not allowed to experience: the surroundings of Fujisawa and, towards the end, the popular holiday region around the island of Enoshima. There we see people with and without face masks walking along the streets, surfers with their boards on their bikes heading for the beach. Depending on the weather and waves, the popular beaches around Enoshima are already packed at half past eight in the morning. A colleague calls it "Little California". We look longingly at the sea, which lies in the unattainable distance for us. "What I miss most is the freedom to move around outside," says Lori Schüpbach, founder and editor-in-chief of the Swiss magazine marina.ch. As we drive past, we are eyed by volunteers, security staff and police. Finally, the bus turns into the road that leads over a causeway onto the island to the official car park in front of the Olympic harbour. From there, we go to the first checkpoint to receive the access wristband for the day. To do this, each reporter has to register daily in the booking system and show their authorisation. On the bus in the morning, we bet on what colour it will be today. On Tuesday it was green - the colour of hope.
With my Olympic accreditation, which I applied for around two and a half years ago and which probably took me around 400 hours of work to prepare for these masked games and fulfil the never-ending requirements, and my wristband, I go through the security gate. First past a row of very many very friendly "hellos" from the helpers. Then to the security staff and members of the army, who check every newcomer, take their body temperature, check their Olympic identity and accreditation several times. The work bag is searched. Then it's done. We briefly pass by the spit sample collection point, then into the large media tent and to the workplace. By then, you've said "Arigatō" about twenty times and caught yourself waving. Politeness is paramount in Japan.
The press centre itself is no different from those at other major events such as the America's Cup or The Ocean Race. There are screens on the walls for the daily broadcasts of the races. The workstations are kept simple and functional, the team is friendly and endeavours to provide good service. The only other authorised contact point for journalists is the mixed zone. This is where you can meet the athletes at a distance for interviews before or after the races. The waiting times can be considerable in temperatures well above 30 degrees, which feel even hotter in the high humidity. On the way to the mixed zone, you walk past the teams' container village. Access to this is prohibited, as is access to the harbour apron, where the sailors work on their boats and push them into the water for races. Like all sports venues at these Games, the entire Olympic harbour consists of bubbles between which no passage is permitted.
Our world in Enoshima is the hotel, the bus, the media centre, the mixed zone. It is a microcosm that triggers one thing above all: A hunger for a little more freedom. The extremely limited opportunities are diametrically opposed to the reporter's job. Whereas at previous Olympic Games it was easy to meet an athlete for a coffee in the morning or for a chat in the evening, to go for a walk along the beach at Rio de Janeiro's Guanabara, such encounters are completely forbidden here. And because there is always a threat of trouble for the athlete as well, it is simply not an option to consider ignoring this.
The athletes themselves also have to do without the things that used to characterise the Olympics alongside the competitions: togetherness. In the Olympic Sailing Village, the athletes spend most of their time in their rooms. The athletes of the German Sailing Team are lucky and have a sea view. Roommates Philipp Buhl and Paul Kohlhoff have set up the fitness bikes they brought from home and remodelled the room a little. In the morning, they greet the day with a cappuccino from the coffee machine Kohlhoff has set up. The swimming pool outside is drained and closed. As are the lawns where, according to Tina Lutz, wonderful yoga classes could have been organised. These games dictated by the coronavirus pandemic leave almost no room for anything other than being, working and competing.
Anyone here knew roughly, if not in every detail, what they were letting themselves in for: constant movement monitoring, daily health monitoring, extreme restrictions. For me as a correspondent, this is the eighth Olympic Games. The other seven have been better and worse. Despite everything, I didn't want to miss this summit in Japan. On the one hand, because a reporter shouldn't chicken out when the going gets tough and there's no substitute for a real, on-site view. Secondly, because Olympians are worth meeting and reporting on. Should the Olympic Games have taken place under these blatant circumstances? For many good reasons, certainly not - which is why very few colleagues from around the world are on site. But for the athletes who have put half their lives into participating and worked so hard for it, they are. Most of them are inspiring.
Tatjana Pokorny
Sports reporter
