Humanities Colloquium: "The Lost Green Games: The Environmental Legacy of a Radically Reimagined Tokyo 2020 Olympics"

Environmental sustainability was a central component to planning Tokyo’s 2020 Summer Olympics. The organizing committee’s sustainability concept of “Be better, together: For the planet and the people” encompassed five major areas of focus ranging from climate change to human rights (guided by the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals). The absence of fans in enormous Olympic stadiums and the void of international visitors at the Summer Games in Tokyo in 2021 exposed in an unprecedented fashion the many excesses of the Olympics. This chapter explores how the shift in focus away from sustainability (and onto public health and safety) left Olympic sustainability initiatives in Tokyo in limbo and called into question broader environmental concerns posed by sports mega-events.