Tokyo Olympics

Tokyo, as well as 26 or so other cities, had put a bid in to host the 2016 Summer Olympics.
From those 27 cities, the list of candidate cities has just been reduced to four…Tokyo, Madrid, Chicago and Rio de Janeiro.

As of right now, Tokyo looks like it may be the most likely choice for host city because Tokyo’s “score” is 8.4 (the highest of the four cities).

The final decision of which city will host the 2016 Olympics will be decided on October 2, 2009 (over a year from now).

If Tokyo hosts the 2016 Olympics, I think I might volunteer as a guide or something. 2016 is still eight years away, so I’m not giving it too much thought right now, though.

The last time (and only time, so far) that Tokyo hosted the Olympics was the 1964 Olympics. It was the first time a “non-Western” country hosted the Olympics!
The “National Olympic Stadium” that was built in Yoyogi, Tokyo for the ’64 Olympics will be re-used as one of the venues in 2016, if Tokyo is chosen as the host.

Have you ever been in a city when it hosted the Olympics?

In 1998, Nagano, Japan hosted the Winter Olympics.
We didn’t have tickets for any of the events, but we wanted to see an “Olympic city”…so we took a 新幹線 (Bullet Train) from Tokyo to Nagano (it was the “Asama” Shinkansen Line that was just built at the time especially for the ’98 Olympics).

Even without event tickets, it was fun.

While we were in Nagano during the ’98 Olympics, we saw Andy Hug before he died.

If you live outside of Japan or you weren’t in Japan in the 1990’s, you probably don’t recognize that name. But he was a very popular K-1 fighter in Japan from Switzerland.

He was in Nagano helping to support the Swiss Olympic team.

He was very polite and was often on TV in Japan in the late ’90s. So it was quite a shock to Japan when he died suddenly at a young age just two years after the 1998 Olympics.

Compared to the other three candidate cities for the 2016 Olympics, a relatively low number of people in Tokyo support the Olympics coming to this city. Many are afraid it will get even more crowded than it already is here and the morning train commute to work will have many tourists filling the trains.

I think, though, that if Tokyo is chosen, it will force the government to build more train lines in the city to accommodate them…and that will benefit those of us that live here in the long term after the Olympics are over.

So I support Tokyo’s bid for the 2016 Olympics.