The Tokyo Olympics are a showcase of men behaving badly.

Raise your hand if you think the Tokyo Olympics should have been canceled a long time ago.

Raise your hand if you think they should just put Simone Biles in her home gym with a camera crew, broadcast her doing her routines, and mail her medals to her with a note of apology for the inconvenience?

Since that’s not happening, we’re all just watching the car crash in slow motion. The most perturbing thing is, a lot of these issues having nothing to do with COVID — it’s just men being terrible.

Olympics Director stepped down after Holocaust joke surfaces.

Organizers were forced to fire Kentaro Kobayashi, director of the Opening Ceremonies, just a day before the event is scheduled to take place.

…

He and another comedian suggested staging a baseball game with a paper bat and ball. The other comedian rushed to one side of the stage supposedly to get a collection of paper-cutout human figures, at which point Kobayashi said: “Ah, from that time you said, ‘Let’s play the Holocaust.’”

(cont. WaPo)

A few weeks ago, a tweet went viral asking people what they would be canceled for if they became a notable person and something from their past resurfaced. I don’t have anything to apologize for where I was intentionally trying to be “provocative” get a reaction. I’ve made some mistakes and learned from them, but they were all instances where I didn’t know what I said was offensive until it was pointed out. Then, you learn, and you take accountability.

A Holocaust joke isn’t a mistake. You know exactly what you’re doing when you make a Holocaust joke, and the kind of person who uses genocide as a punchline shouldn’t be the Creative Director of an event whose slogan is Unity in Diversity.

Before that, previous Creative Director resigned over fatphobic comments.

Creative director Hiroshi Sasaki resigned on Thursday after making demeaning comments about a well-known female celebrity in Japan.

…

Last year he suggested to planning staff members in online “brainstorming exchanges” that well-known entertainer Naomi Watanabe could perform in the ceremony as an “Olympig.”

Watanabe is a female fashion icon and very famous in Japan. Sasaki’s “Olympig” reference was an obvious play on the word “Olympic.”

(cont. NBC News)

And Before that, Tokyo Olympics President resigned over sexist remarks.

And today, Olympics Composer resigned after bullying comments surface.

Keigo Oyamada, aka Cornelius, is the official composer for the Tokyo Olympics, and when I read that he’d stepped down, I initially didn’t look any further into it. The headlines said he bullied some of his classmates in school, some of whom were intellectually disabled, and I figured it was typical (not acceptable, but typical) schoolyard bullying, the kind of thing you grow out of. You called a few people the r-slur in 5th grade, forgot all about it, grew into a normal person who would never do that as an adult, and went about your life. Then, when you become a visible person, the comments come to light and it’s like, “oh dang, I forgot all about that, I was a real douchebag as a child and I’m so sorry I was like that.”

But no! It’s way worse, and I’m almost certain this guy is still some sort of sociopath.

Keigo Oyamada, who is better known as Cornelius, initially resisted calls to quit after reports surfaced last week of magazine interviews he gave in the mid-1990s in which he appeared to boast about the incidents.

…

Oyamada told Quick Japan magazine in 1995 how he had confined a classmate in a cardboard box and forced a boy with an intellectual disability to eat his own faeces and masturbate in front of other children. He made similar comments in another magazine interview a year earlier.

(cont. The Guardian)

Let’s be blunt: You don’t make your classmates eat shit as a child, brag about it to a magazine as an adult, and then magically regret your actions as an older adult. The fact that the Olympics committee accepted his apology at first is a real disappointment, but thanks to the enduring power of social media and public shame, you can’t brush it under the rug once it hits the internet.

So. Around ten athletes have tested positive for COVID-19 and Tokyo is experiencing their highest infection rate since January. You would think nothing could overshadow a highly infectious contagion threating to run rampant through the Olympics community, but never underestimate the power of a man in charge flapping his gums in the wind.